the official police account in the #GeorgeFloyd case was v. diff than what the cellphone video showed. but police are incentivized to lie as a matter of course, bc every arrest/encounter/instance of use of force must be shown to be justified and correct. http://nyti.ms/2zreZyX ">https://nyti.ms/2zreZyX&q...

the thousands of bullshit stops that don& #39;t end as catastrophically as George Floyd& #39;s still have to be recorded as right and necessary.

it& #39;s worth thinking through what that means for journalism and reporting which has traditionally treated police accounts as the final word.

re: this...another recent case of police killing in the Minneapolis area shows how this works in practice.

as my colleague @eyderp found, Philando Castile was stopped by the cops nearly 50 TIMES from the time he began driving to the day they shot him. https://n.pr/2nT5ZJs ">https://n.pr/2nT5ZJs&q...

"Of all of the stops, only six of them were things a police officer would notice from outside a car — things like speeding or having a broken muffler."

which is to say that the officially stated reason for almost all of those stops was a lie that cops constructed after the fact.

this kind of routinized, institutionalized lying only became visible because Castile was killed. there& #39;s nothing about it that& #39;s anomalous or about the individual officers. this is just how policing works.

but hey, enjoy Brooklyn Nine-Nine or whatever