<p>Accurate crime statistics are fundamental to police accountability. Yet police have often been found to misclassify crimes and release manipulated statistics to create the appearance of effective policing. Since local newspapers typically reveal such misreporting, the widespread closure of newspapers could lead to increased misreporting. This can be conceptualized, in terms of routine activity theory, as the loss of capable guardians, or from the perspective of rational choice theory, as a reduction in expected costs for manipulating statistics. We examine how local newspaper closures (<i>n</i> = 159) from 2002 through 2017 affect crime statistics reported by U.S. police departments, using Uniform Crime Reports data and a stacked regression difference-in-differences design. In line with expectations, we observe an increase in the rate at which rapes are classified as unfounded after local newspaper closures, but observe no change in the rate of unfounded auto-thefts or homicides. If changes in unfounded rates arose from shifts in record-keeping practices, changes would be apparent across crime categories. Our results thus suggest that statistical manipulation occurred after newspaper closures. However, neither the actual crime rates nor clearance rates changed after newspaper closures. Additionally, while overall county death rates remain unchanged, a substitution effect is observed for the cause of death whereby the proportion of deaths due to homicides decreased and that due to suicides increased. This suggests that certain homicides were misclassified as suicides. Results suggest that local newspapers play an important monitoring role in police accountability, serving as a check on police departments’ power over crime-related information.</p>