For instance, in 2023 Phillip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green University, told USA TODAY that “it's a normal part of policing in some places for police officers to lie." An earlier USA TODAY report looked into disciplinary records of tens of thousands of police officers around the country and found that dishonesty was “a frequent problem.” 

The police press release issued after Minneapolis cops killed George Floyd in May of 2020, titled “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction,” is a case in point. The police report referred to Floyd as a “suspect,” accused him of resisting arrest, and cited medical distress — making no mention of what soon came to be well-known fact: that the distress was not drug induced, as they initially claimed, but the result of a cop pressing his knee to Floyd’s neck in broad daylight for nine minutes. Another example is the case of Sonya Massey, killed by police in Illinois in 2024: the initial police report about her death mentioned “shots had been fired” but did not mention that it was police officers who fired the shots. Video footage later revealed that an officer had shot Massey, who was unarmed, at close range in her own kitchen.  

“The press release about George Floyd was not an anomaly,” Jody David Armour, a University of Southern California law professor, told The Guardian. “This is ordinary operating procedures for police departments across the nation.”

A 2021 report from The Guardian uncovered a dozen examples over five years in California alone “of initial police statements misrepresenting events, with major omissions about the officers’ actions, inaccurate narratives about the victims’ behaviors, or blatant falsehoods about decisive factors.” Police blamed individuals' medical conditions for deaths in custody, left out key details that would implicate them, and painted their victims as “criminals” and “perpetrators.”

Since the 2020 Uprisings, many investigations and news reports have uncovered what witnesses and families already knew: that cops lie as a matter of course about incidents they are implicated in. In 2023, the Washington Post covered seven prominent deaths at the hands of police and found that initial police reports were generally misleading, criminalized the person who had been killed, used the passive voice to describe police actions, and sometimes simply fabricated reality to make cops look innocent. The Post concluded that, “In cases where the police are later accused of excessive and unwarranted use of force, the first draft of history is almost always written in part by those same officers, who often portray the police in flattering ways and the alleged suspect in less flattering ones.”

There is no single database of police reports or tracker for police deceptions, and constructing such a resource would be difficult: even the prominent national databases of police killings depend on news reports for verification because neither the states nor the federal government compel police departments to self-report instances of police violence. News reports, especially initially, are often based on police reports, which means the reported cases are generally the ones in which an alternate narrative somehow made it into the news. And as a general principle, it is difficult to know when someone has lied if they get away with it.