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On the street to other police officers:

“He came from that bus stop and came literally charging at the car with the gun out.�

In the bathroom at the police station:

“He ran up to the car and put the gun to the window.�

In the hallway:

“He ran towards our car at like full speed.�

In the office:

“The dude, he wouldn’t back down.�

The “dude� is the man who became the subject of a media blitz a couple of weeks ago when police reported the astonishing story that two police officers in a marked police vehicle had been victims of an attempted carjacking in the LaSalle Park neighborhood south of downtown.

The incident drew headlines across the country, reinforcing the city’s reputation as having an out-of-control crime problem. The next day drew more headlines, spurred again by police sources, who complained that St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner had refused charges in the case. “Woke St. Louis DA refuses to charge armed robbery suspect who tried to CARJACK marked police car and pointed gun at officers inside,� screamed the headline in the London Daily Mail.

“Outrageous and true,� wrote St. Louis Police Officers’ Association lobbyist Jane Dueker, now a candidate for St. Louis County executive, on Twitter, responding to that bit of alleged news.

What is actually outrageous, however, is that the police narrative was not entirely true. That became clear this week when Gardner’s office released , a timeline of her office’s attempts to seek proper charges and some of the officer’s body camera footage. That footage included his multiple descriptions of the incident, some of them contradictory, because he accidentally left his camera on all day, including while he was in the police station.

The entire affair was, as civil rights attorney Thomas Harvey calls it: “copaganda� gone wild. That pejorative term — copaganda — is what Harvey, who is the co-founder of ArchCity Defenders and now the California state director for the Children’s Defense Fund, refers to as attempts by police to build false narratives about crime, all too often with the unwitting help of the media.

“It happens every day,� Harvey says.

His friend and fellow attorney Alec Karakatsanis, founder of nonprofit Civil Rights Corps, regularly tweets long social media threads about mainstream media stories in which he is critical of the role journalists often play in contributing to copaganda. As a journalist, the critiques are hard to read, because over time in my career, I’ve committed every one of the sins alleged by Karakatsanis in his threads.

It starts with two words that are standard journalistic practice when reporting an alleged crime.

“The two most dangerous words in the English language might just be ‘police say’ because anything that comes after that is presumed to be true,� Harvey says. “That’s the way journalists, readers, judges, and many jury members interpret what comes from a cop’s mouth. For decades, journalists have been writing stories about crime that start with ‘police say’ or ‘officials report’ as the sole basis. You can point to the killings of Eric Garner, Walter Scott and George Floyd, and Laquan McDonald as examples. The initial statements from the cops either overtly lied about or didn’t reveal the role cops played in the killings.�

The so-called carjacking case — because of the body camera video and the detailed timeline released by Gardner’s office — offers a primer into the process of charging a potential defendant. When police arrest a subject who is detained, they apply for charges with the circuit attorney’s office, which often asks for more information or suggests charges different than the ones suggested by police. That’s what happened here, with Gardner originally filing a charge of “exhibiting� a weapon, a charge that has since been dropped.

While investigating further, the circuit attorney’s office asked for video from nearby businesses, specifically the corporate headquarters of Purina. Police never called to ask for the video, the circuit attorney’s office says. So prosecutors did. What they found was a video of the incident that contradicts at least some of the police officers’ narrative. On the video, the man wandered into traffic ahead of the moving police vehicle with his hands at his side, then he walked away as the police vehicle, a truck, drove forward. He didn’t run. He most definitely didn’t charge directly in front of the truck with a weapon drawn. If there was an attempted carjacking, this video doesn’t show it. (Both the Police Officers’ Association and the Ethical Society of Police claim the man confessed in a video after he was arrested.)

“This is nowhere near what he (an officer) represented,� says Chris Hinckley, the warrant officer in the circuit attorney’s office. “You wonder why nobody got this footage.�

Harvey doesn’t wonder. He expects police wanted a narrative. Crime is bad, and the progressive prosecutor is to blame. They got their headlines, even encouraged by a lieutenant in the station before charges were sought, according to the body camera video.

“St. Louis has a rich history of cops lying and copaganda,� Harvey says.

This time, it’s the circuit attorney making the allegation, calling the incident a “serious breach of trust,� much to the chagrin of the police union that appears more interested in headlines than justice.