Based on Miles’ thesis regarding institutional racism that “other words carry the original meaning,” this paper aims at analyzing modes and functions of racialized knowledge in police antigypsyism. To achieve this, it tracks the development of antigypsyist police terminology from openly racist slurs via more codified wording and finally focuses on the use of modi operandi. It argues that those modi operandi play a key role in contemporary antigypsyist police knowledge as they allow police institutions in democratic societies to uphold antigypsyist concepts without explicitly mentioning an ethnic group even though the congruence of terminology and racialized meaning is blurred. To conclude, it analyzes how academic criminological works contribute to the upholding and refining of this antigypsyist knowledge by functioning as an echo chamber for police perspectives on those perceived as ‘gypsies.’