blue lie

English

Etymology

Coined by Carl Klockars referring to the blue color of American police uniforms. Klockars used the term for a lie told in order to achieve compliance without resorting to force. However, the term later became generalized to all lies told by police, and then especially to the lies told by police officers to conceal questionable behavior on the part of police force. By extension, the term came to mean any lie told to protect the reputation of one's group or organization, even when not told by a police officer.

Noun

blue lie (plural blue lies)

1. A lie told by a police officer in order to get someone to comply with his or her wishes, thereby avoiding the use of force.
   • 1984 March, Carl B. B Klockars, “Blue lies and police placebos: The moralities of police lying”, in American Behavioral Scientist:

     Blue lies are different from police placebos in that they are not told to help or comfort the person lied to but, rather, to exert control

   • 1994, J. A. Barnes, John Arundel Barnes, Jack Goody, A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying, page 43:

     Hence the individuals most likely to become the dupes of blue lies are those who do not respond submissively to the power and authority of the police or to non-deceptive attempts at persuasion.

   • 2011, Joycelyn M. Pollock, Ethical Dilemmas and Decisions in Criminal Justice, page 141:

     Blue lies are those used to control the person or to make the job easier in situations where force could be used. For example, to make an arrest eaiser, an officer will lie about where the suspect is being taken, or to get someone out on the street to be arrested, the officer will say that she only wants to talk.

   • 2015, Jonathan Blanks, “Thin blue lies: how pretextual stops undermine police legitimacy”, in Case Western Reserve Law Review, volume 66, number 4:

     (see title)

2. A lie told to protect the reputation of one's group or organization.
   • 1990, Prakash Diar, The Sharpeville six, page 157:

     About Manete's evidence, that Francis had asked him why he did not join the people, why he did not fight, Francis said, "No, he is telling a blue lie."

   • 2014, Elizabeth J. Robinson, Shiri Einav, Trust and Skepticism, page 90:

     Fu et al. (2013) found that Chinese participants judged blue lies less negatively than did their American counterparts, and that this difference increased with age.

   • 2015, Austin Sarat, Law and Lies, page 54:

     Blue lies are so pervasive that even former prosecutors have described them as "commonplace" and "prevalent."

   • 2019, Tony Docan-Morgan, The Palgrave Handbook of Deceptive Communication, page 78:

     More recently, the concept of blue lies has been applied to the political behaviors of politicians and the perception of their misrepresentations based on recipients' partisan affiliations (Flynn, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2017).

   • 2019, Kate Hartley, Communicate in a Crisis:

     Could this theory explain why so many companies deliberately deceive their audiences in a crisis situation, perceiving the crisis almost as a state of war? To protect the company, you feel you have to tell a blue lie.

See also

• white lie