Current editorial policy

We provide a neutral space for you to share your experience of the service you received from your police.

We will also help you have conversations with your local police officers, so that you can play a role in improving police services.

We want to publish as many of the stories we receive as possible.

However, in a few cases, we may need to make some changes.

Here are the guidelines we use to make sure we edit your submissions as little - and as sensitively - as we can.

By reading the following guidelines, you'll increase your chances of having your story published with as few changes as possible. So it's worth a few minutes of your time before you submit your first story.

We'll always try to keep as much of your original as we can. And if we've had to edit more than just a few details, we'll contact you to let you know why.

What we publish

MyPolice exists to share public feedback on police services for the benefit of society, and to help improve the services themselves.

So we want to publish contributions which are informative, truthful, helpful to others, or offer constructive feedback to those responsible for providing the service the police can offer.

Your feedback can often be critical - sometimes strongly critical. And that doesn't stop us publishing it.

However, we prefer it if you tell us how things could have been better, not just what was wrong. And the police will be able to react better to this, too. So there's more chance of your input leading to real, lasting and positive change.

What we edit

We may edit the title of a story to make it more descriptive or helpful to other people and the police.

We will remove any offensive language, such as swearing, or racist, sexist, homophobic or other discriminatory language.

Sometimes we have to edit a contribution to protect someone's anonymity. Especially if they are writing about a friend or relative, rather than themselves.

For legal reasons we may also remove police staff names, to ensure their identity is protected, too.

Sometimes we edit for the sake of accuracy, for example to make it clear that a criticism applies only to a particular department not the force; or to some, but not all, staff.

Sometimes we edit stories to make it clear that they refer to the direct experience of the individual. For example "the police are rude" might be edited to "the policeman I dealt with was rude".

People often express opinions about the character, competence or motivations of named police staff. We usually edit and may choose not to publish these comments, for legal reasons. But this doesn't prevent us from publishing clear factual statements about your experiences and how they made you feel.

What we won't publish

We will reject contributions that are mainly obscene, commercial or irrelevant to MyPolice.

Though we make every effort to publish postings, we reserve the right not to publish any posting, at our discretion, and not to give reason.

MyPolice exists so that people can share the story of their police service and have conversations with police and staff that improve services. So our Editorial Policy aims to publish as many of the stories we are told as we possibly can. However, in a few cases we may need to make some changes. Here are the guidelines we use to make sure that this is done sensitively and with minimum change.

When we publish peoples opinions on this website, we may edit them first.

If we do edit an opinion, we will keep the changes to the minimum necessary to comply with our editorial policy, which is set out below. If it has been necessary to edit more than a few details we will notify the person doing the posting.