British police officers will be forced to name any friends who work in the media, or else face the sack, under new guidelines

Every officer in England and Wales will have to formally declare any friendship outside his workplace with a journalist, effectively meaning that people working in media organisations would be placed in the same bracket as criminals. 

Many police forces already require their officers and staff to declare any 'associations' with criminals, suspects or private detectives.

Officers who fail to report friendships, and are judged to have concealed the relationship, could now face dismissal for gross misconduct. 

The move will alarm censorship campaigners and government ministers, with fears that police forces are trying to usher in a new era of secrecy and taking advantage of the Leveson Inquiry into media standards.

Police managers are already trying to clamp down on whistleblowers and critics within forces, frontline police representatives have warned.

The change emerged in new guidelines on police relationships with the media, published by the new College of Policing, the Daily Mail reported.
The measures were first suggested when former parliamentary standards watchdog Elizabeth Filkin recommended in her report for the Metropolitan Police that extending the system currently in place for reporting associations with criminals should be extended to the media.
Senior officers must now review the names of any friends who work in the media, with police told to register their associations on a secret database. 

The guidance also says that forces must name people when they are charged with a criminal offence, unless there are exceptional circumstances involved, meaning they can identify those arrested as part of inquiries when it is in the public interest or when it could help prevent or detect crime.
Prime Minister David Cameron stepped into the row last week, confirming that “making things public should be the working assumption”. 

Kirsty Hughes, from Index on Censorship, said: “The default position that people who have been arrested should not be named goes against the principle of open justice that our criminal justice is based on.
“Rather than having a policy of secrecy with exceptional circumstances for naming individuals, Index believes that there should be a policy of openness with exceptional circumstances for withholding information.”