About

We Investigated Ourselves and Found No Wrongdoing is a humorous catchphrase that parodies the instances of authority organizations, most commonly governments and police forces, holding an internal investigation and then reporting that nothing illegal had been discovered. The catchphrase implies that since the organization engaged in the wrongdoing performed the investigation itself, it could be lying to the public to hide any wrongdoing that took place and protect those involved. The phrase first gained prominence online in the mid-2010s and bears thematic similarity to the Latin phrase "Who watches the watchmen?"

Origin

Prior to November 3rd, 2014, during the grand jury hearing of the Michael Brown case of a Fergusson police officer fatally shooting an unarmed Black teenager, Tumblr^[1] user n0--scrubz posted an image macro of the Chief of Police of Fresno Jerry Dyer holding captioned "We investigated ourselves and cleared ourselves of any wrong doing," commenting, "Have they cleared Darren Wilson yet? (And all the other shooters in blue?)" (authorship unconfirmed). The post (shown below) received over 67,000 likes and reblogs in 11 years.

Spread

On November 25th, 2014, after Prosecutor McCulloch reported that the grand jury reached a decision not to indict the police officer involved, the Facebook^[2] page The Other 98% posted an image macro that paired the caption with a photograph of McCulloh. The post (shown below) garnered over 7,000 reactions and 2,000 shares and was widely circulated in the following days.

While the image macros saw some use online through the 2010s,^[3][4] the catchphrase achieved higher popularity in the early 2020s.

For example, on June 23rd, 2020, X^[5] user @bethbourdon used the phrase to comment on a post of an internal investigation conducted by the NYPD following an incident involving police during the George Floyd protests. The post (shown below) received over 51,000 reposts and 203,000 likes on X in five years.

On November 1st, 2024, X^[6] user @RyanHugeBrain used the phrase to reply to a conclusive report from an internal investigation launched by YouTuber MrBeast regarding his former collaborator Ava Kris Tyson. The reply (shown below) received over 860 reposts and 71,000 likes in seven months.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References