During the summer of protests that followed the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, journalists and readers alike began taking a hard look at how much news reporting relied on police sources. In particular, the standard use of “police said” articles — where the main or only source of information came from law enforcement — was leading the media to publish information that was outright wrong.

In their first media statement on Floyd’s death, Minneapolis police claimed that officers had observed Floyd “suffering medical distress and called for an ambulance”; it was only when cell phone video emerged that it was reported that police were in fact kneeling on Floyd’s neck at the time. To many, it was all too familiar a pattern: five years earlier, the Baltimore Sun had based its reporting on the police killing of Freddie Gray almost entirely on official police statements, downplaying eyewitness reports that officers had thrown Gray headfirst into a van shortly before he died of neck injuries.

“What the police tell you initially is a rumor,” Mel Reeves, an editor at the then eighty-six-year-old Africa American newspaper the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder told the Washington Post, “and a lot of the times it’s not accurate.” CNN, in a report on how camera footage often ended up disproving police claims, went further: “Videos from several recent incidents, and countless others from over the years, have shown what many Black Americans have long maintained: that police officers lie.”