Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The Paper Person: How a False Police Report Becomes a Fact

A police report is one officer’s story, written after the fact with no one on the other side of the table. New Hampshire’s own misconduct list shows how often that story is wrong — and repetition does the rest.

The most consequential document in American criminal justice is written by one person, alone, after the event, with nobody on the other side of the table. A police report shapes whether charges get filed, what a bail commissioner reads, what a prosecutor believes, what a judge assumes, what a family court weighs, and what a background check turns up years later. Every one of those readers treats it as a record. What they are holding is a story.

That distinction is the whole problem. A story has an author, and an author makes choices: which details go in, which get left out, whether you were “uncooperative” or scared, whether you “refused to comply” or asked a question. String enough of those choices together and the report stops describing a person and starts inventing one. The paper person can be angrier than you, drunker than you, more dangerous than you. The paper person can be someone who never existed at all. And once the paper person is filed, the system stops looking at you.

This is not a theory I am asking you to take on faith. New Hampshire keeps an official state list of police officers whose own files contain reasons to doubt their word. The categories printed on that list are the state’s admission that the failure mode is real.

New Hampshire keeps a list. Read the categories.

In 1995 the New Hampshire Supreme Court threw out a murder conviction in State v. Laurie because prosecutors failed to disclose damaging information from the lead detective’s employment files. The case forced county attorneys to start tracking officers whose personnel records could impeach their testimony. In 2017 the Attorney General took the lists statewide and renamed the result the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule. In 2020 the state Supreme Court ruled the schedule was not categorically exempt from disclosure, and in 2021 the Legislature passed the law now codified at RSA 105:13-d, requiring the Department of Justice to publish it once officers’ appeal windows close.

When the full public version landed in March 2022, it named 174 current and former officers, with 91 more names still blacked out pending appeals; the Attorney General’s own January 2022 report counted 265 entries in total. By the summer of 2024 the list carried 270 names, 59 of them redacted, according to the Concord Monitor. The most recent public schedule was posted February 11, 2026. It runs eight pages.

Look at what the state prints next to each name. The categories are one or two words: “Truthfulness.” “Excessive Force.” “Criminal Conduct.” “Falsifying Reports.” “Falsifying Records.” “Falsifying Evidence.” NHPR’s reporting on the release found the vast majority of entries fall under “Truthfulness,” a category the state does not define. The 2017 Department of Justice memo that built the schedule offers this comfort: “inclusion on the EES does not mean that an officer is necessarily untrustworthy or dishonest.” Read that sentence twice. The state built a registry of officers whose files contain potentially exculpatory material, then reassured everyone that the registry means less than it appears to.

This is not somebody else’s county. The public schedule includes entries from departments across the Lakes Region — Laconia, Tilton, Bristol, Moultonborough, the Belknap County Sheriff’s office — and one from Northfield, where this outlet is based. The document itself cautions that listed officers may no longer work for the agencies shown. Fair enough. But the reports they wrote are still in the files, still being read, still being believed.

Sometimes the falsification is not abstract. Former Claremont officer Ian Kibbe served 90 days in jail after a guilty plea in which, NHPR reported, he admitted to illegally searching a suspect’s room and then lying about it in a police report. His entry on the schedule reads “Falsifying records/criminal conduct.” That is the rare case where the paper trail caught up with the paper. Most of the time it does not.

When the camera reads the report

The best national evidence on how often police paperwork diverges from reality comes from what happens when video shows up. A 2018 New York Times investigation by Joseph Goldstein documented more than 25 cases since January 2015 in which New York judges or prosecutors concluded a key part of an officer’s sworn account was probably untrue. In one, an officer testified a woman set down a laundry bag containing a gun directly in his path; a hallway camera showed no bag at all. Prosecutors dropped the case and the court sealed the file. Officers themselves had a word for the practice long before the cameras arrived. “You take the truth and stretch it out a little bit,” one officer told the Times.

New Hampshire has its own version, and it reached the state Supreme Court in 2024. Three retired state troopers sued to get off the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule. Nobody disputed what they did: roughly twenty years earlier, required to log a minimum number of traffic stops per shift, they inflated the enforcement numbers in their activity logs. False entries, in official records, to satisfy a quota. The court’s 3–1 decision in Doe v. New Hampshire Attorney General revived their bid for removal, reasoning in part that conduct that old might no longer be potentially exculpatory. Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald, the state’s former attorney general, dissented that he was “unaware of any legal basis to impose an expiration date” on the fact that an officer lied. In New Hampshire, in other words, a documented false record now comes with an argument for its own erasure.

The report as a weapon

Officers are not the only authors who can weaponize a report. Police also memorialize what complainants tell them, and researchers have documented for years how abusive people exploit exactly that. A 2011 study in the journal Violence Against Women by Susan Miller and Nicole Smolter named the tactic “paper abuse”: frivolous filings, false allegations, and system-generated contact used to keep controlling a former partner after the relationship ends. Each individual report can be unfounded. The stack is the point. Five unfounded reports read, to every later official who pulls the file, like a history. The target spends years answering paper; the author spends an afternoon generating it.

New Hampshire law has long made the underlying act a crime. RSA 641:4 makes it a misdemeanor to knowingly feed false information to an officer to make them believe someone else committed an offense. Prosecutions are another matter, and the person named in a false report rarely learns it was filed until it surfaces somewhere that hurts.

Here is what the Legislature did about false reports this year. House Bill 109, which cleared its final House vote on April 9, 2026, and was signed by Governor Kelly Ayotte in May, creates a separate criminal offense for knowingly making false or baseless allegations of misconduct against a police officer. Notice the direction of travel. When the imagined victim of false paper is an officer, Concord writes a new crime. When the actual victim is a citizen on the wrong end of an officer’s false report, the remedy is an internal complaint routed to the department that wrote it — and, years later, maybe a one-word entry on a list the state itself says you should not read too much into.

Why repetition works on you

False reports endure because repetition rewires belief, and careless reading has little to do with it. Psychologists call the mechanism the illusory truth effect, first measured in a 1977 study by Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino: statements people saw repeatedly were rated more true than statements they saw once, regardless of whether they were true. A 2015 study led by Lisa Fazio in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General found something worse. Repetition raised belief even when participants already knew the correct answer. Knowing better does not protect you. Propagandists ran this play for a century before the lab confirmed the mechanism; the doctrine that a lie repeated often enough hardens into accepted fact was state practice in the twentieth century’s worst regimes, and the cognitive machinery it exploited is still installed in every one of us.

Now watch the machinery run inside a courthouse. The report becomes the affidavit. The affidavit becomes the bail argument. The bail argument becomes the two-paragraph news brief, written straight from the report because the reporter had nothing else. The next officer who stops you pulls the old file and writes a new report shaded by the first one. Each document cites the one before it. By the time the original account has been restated five times in five official places, it has the texture of settled fact — and there was never more than one witness, writing alone, unchallenged, after the fact.

Correcting the record is nearly impossible

Try to unwind a false report and you learn how the system is tilted. If the falsehood sits in a warrant affidavit, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Franks v. Delaware requires you to make a “substantial preliminary showing” that the officer lied knowingly or recklessly, and that the lie was necessary to probable cause, before a judge will even hold a hearing on it. If the falsehood sits in an ordinary incident report, there is no hearing to ask for. You can file a complaint with the department whose employee wrote it, and the department will investigate itself.

Compare that with the process New Hampshire built for officers. Before a name goes public on the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule, the officer gets notice, a right to sue in Superior Court, sealed dockets while the case runs, and now — after the 2024 ruling — an argument that misconduct simply expires. A Lisbon officer’s challenge to his placement has been running through state and federal courts for years. The citizen described in a false report gets none of that machinery. No notice. No sealed docket. No court-supervised path to correction. The officer’s reputation has due process; yours has a records request.

Treat reports as claims

The fix asks for accuracy about what a report is, and none of it requires hostility to police. A report is testimony without an oath, written by an interested party, and it should be read with exactly the skepticism that description demands. Judges and bail commissioners should say so out loud. Departments should audit a sample of reports against body-camera footage as routine supervision, the way any newsroom checks a reporter’s quotes, and should treat a report contradicted by its own video as a personnel event, every time. Prosecutors should stop treating “the report says” as the end of a factual dispute. And the public schedule the state already maintains should be the floor of transparency here, since New Hampshire has conceded, in print, that some unknowable fraction of its official narrators cannot be fully vouched for.

The state wrote that concession down, published it, and updates it quarterly. The least the rest of us can do is stop reading police reports as scripture. Paper does not become true by being filed or repeated. It becomes true when someone checks. That job, as usual, is ours.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was verified against primary sources before publication; see the fact-check table. The N.H. DOJ website and the General Court site block automated retrieval; the DOJ’s statutory publication statement and RSA text were confirmed through search-indexed copies of those pages and mirrored statute databases, and the Feb. 11, 2026 schedule was read in full from the InDepthNH-hosted copy of the state document. HB 109’s description reflects the bill as drafted and its enacted status; the session-law text should be consulted for the final penalty structure. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.