Claim:
An authentic news report from November 2025 showed a woman calling the police on her Black neighbor, who turned out to be Boston’s chief of police.
Rating:
In November 2025, videos appeared on social media sites including Instagram, TikTok and Threads claiming that a white woman had called the police on her Black neighbor, who turned out to be the Boston chief of police. Some videos sharing the claim appeared to be from a TV news broadcast, with an off-camera reporter narrating events seen on screen. Snopes readers wrote in asking us to verify details about the story.
The video and its accompanying story were fake. Snopes identified signs in the footage, narration and script that were hallmarks of content generated with artificial intelligence tools.
AI tools often struggle to accurately display perspective, as seen at one point in the purported security footage when one of the man’s ears disappears into his head. In addition, the hallway rug bleeds into the slightly opened door throughout the course of the footage.
The video’s off-screen narrator also had unnatural pauses and strange inflections. As an example, the narrator claimed the police chief “had moved into Apartment 412 days earlier” when the confrontation occurred. A human might say “apartment 412” as “apartment four-twelve,” the subconscious format many English speakers use when reading building and apartment numbers. The narrator, however, read the phrase as “apartment four hundred twelve days earlier,” with an intonation suggesting the man had been a resident for more than a year.
Additionally, the script language contained words AI tools often use when asked to write narratives. The police chief in the story “replied calmly” to the woman’s accusation. Journalists are taught to almost exclusively use the word “said” when quoting someone and tend to avoid adverbs in order to maintain impartiality.
Although one version of the video appeared to be from a news broadcast, no reputable outlet had published a story detailing the incident.
To top it all off, the story contained blatant factual errors. While the videos claimed that Boston’s police chief was a man named Marcus Thompson, the chief of Boston’s police department at the time the video circulated was Michael Cox. The videos claimed the supposed confrontation happened in the “Glendale Arms” apartment complex. Searching for that term revealed exactly one apartment building with that name — located more than 300 miles away in Philadelphia.
For further reading, we’ve also debunked AI-generated videos that claimed to show a sanitation worker rescuing a baby and a Russian man in a boat saving a bear cub.
