In this essay, I examine the sociopolitical consequences of policing plagiarism and evaluating students' ethics within the context of basic writing's longstanding tradition of remediating and reshaping pedagogies, ideological stances, and what counts as academic writing. With the hope of illustrating how we might be more intentional about resisting policing tactics, I provide a handful of anecdotes demonstrating how scholarship on authorship and plagiarism, alongside my research with the Citation Project (a large-scale study of student source use), has helped me rework source use in the classroom as a practice within a larger system of values in academic discourse. I argue that we teachers of basic writing, alongside all teachers of composition, must examine our own values placed on source use, acknowledge these values as cultural rather than natural, and then work collaboratively with students to demystify and contest the very values we hold and expect students to also share and uphold. And in doing so, I believe we may further contribute to the field's ongoing endeavor of reworking academic English in ways that make the language and its writing more accessible to and representative of all of its many users.