On review, the supreme court first determined that section 609.505, subdivision 2, punished a substantial amount of protected speech in addition to unprotected speech. Id. at 104. The court cited Minnesota’s defamation definition and concluded that section 609.505 did not satisfy all of the elements of defamation because it did not require publication to a third person. Id. at 104-05. The supreme court, however, determined that it could uphold the constitutionality of the statute by narrowly construing it to punish only communications that satisfy Minnesota’s defamation definition. Id. at 105. Accordingly, to subject an individual to criminal sanctions under Minn. Stat. § 609.505, subd. 2, for a defamatory communication, the supreme court required that an individual must inform a separate police officer of misconduct by a police officer. Id. at 107. Thus, the first element of defamation—communication to a third party—was satisfied. Id. The state argues that this court should follow Crawley and narrowly construe section 609.765 by removing the “with good motives and for justifiable ends” language found in subdivision 3(1) so that the first justification reads “the defamatory matter is true.” Here, like the statute at issue in Crawley, section 609.765 encompasses both protected non-defamatory speech and unprotected defamatory speech. The supreme court in Crawley limited the statute at issue to only the non-protected speech—speech satisfying Minnesota’s defamation definition. We cannot do the same here. We are mindful of the canon of constitutional avoidance, which requires, if at all possible, the judiciary to interpret a statute to “preserve its constitutionality.” Hutchinson Tech., Inc. v. Comm’r of Revenue, 698 N.W.2d 1, 18 (Minn. 2005); see Minn. Stat. § 645.17(3) (2012) (“[T]he legislature does not intend to violate the Constitution of the 11