tell vs tell the police about

tell

verb
  • To order; to direct, to say to someone. 

  • To instruct or inform. 

  • To narrate. 

  • To reveal. 

  • To convey by speech; to say. 

  • To reveal information in prose through outright expository statement -- contrasted with show 

  • To count, reckon, or enumerate. 

  • To have an effect, especially a noticeable one; to be apparent, to be demonstrated. 

  • To inform someone in authority about a wrongdoing. 

  • To discern, notice, identify or distinguish. 

  • To be revealed. 

  • To use (beads or similar objects) as an aid to prayer. 

noun
  • A private message to an individual in a chat room; a whisper. 

  • A hill or mound, originally and especially in the Middle East, over or consisting of the ruins of ancient settlements. 

  • A reflexive, often habitual behavior, especially one occurring in a context that often features attempts at deception by persons under psychological stress (such as a poker game or police interrogation), that reveals information that the person exhibiting the behavior is attempting to withhold. 

tell the police about

How often have the words tell and tell the police about occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )