In March 2020, police officers in Louisville, Kentucky, shot and killed 26-year-old Breonna Taylor when they invaded her home to search for an alleged drug dealer. The events that led to the innocent bystander’s death started with deception: Police officers made false statements to a judge to get the warrant. If not for those lies, Breonna Taylor might still be alive.
Police accountability and misconduct have received significant press in recent years, with particular focus on racial bias and excessive force. More people are paying attention, and that’s good. But the appallingly routine habit of police providing false testimony, both in written reports and on the witness stand, still doesn’t get enough attention.
This practice is so common that police officers coined their own word for it decades ago: testilying. Scholarly studies of police departments in the United States agree that the police lie, and regularly so, not just to suspects but to lawyers and judges too. In Chicago, where I was a public defender, courts have exonerated nearly 200 people since 2016 who were wrongfully convicted by officers who planted drugs, coerced people into testifying falsely and lied about their own abuses. In Minneapolis, where I now teach and work as a policing scholar, the initial police narrative after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 noted that Floyd “appeared to be suffering medical distress” during the arrest, and omitted any mention of officers kneeling on Floyd’s neck.
This practice is outrageous. While police departments themselves bear substantial blame for tolerating deception, they are not the only responsible group. Two other key actors share responsibility for enabling this practice and have opportunities to prevent it: prosecutors and judges.
Many police forces have a deeply rooted us-against-them culture, where they see certain members of their community as criminal and will justify using whatever means necessary to “get the bad guy,” including falsifying affidavits and lying about how they obtained evidence.
In 1961, the United States
