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It’s been over a week since “Empire” actor Jussie Smollet was arrested and charged with a felony for orchestrating a hate crime against himself and filing a false police report.
While the incident in Chicago grabbed international headlines, it’s not uncommon for people to give false information to law enforcement. In Kosciusko County, dozens of people a year are charged with false informing, a Class A or B misdemeanor depending on circumstances.
Kosciusko County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Shane Bucher said that 60 people were arrested for false informing in 2014. That dropped to 47 in 2015 and 29 in 2016. However, that figure shot back up to 55 in 2017 and 60 in 2018. So far in 2019, eight people have been booked into the Kosciusko County Jail for false informing.
“Over the last five years we’ve taken, and it’s not really false informing, 241 unfounded police reports,” Bucher said.
He said an unfounded report is if law enforcement receives a call about criminal activity but can’t substantiate a crime to pursue it further.
According to Indiana Code in “Criminal Law and Procedure,” provided by Bucher, a person who gives a false report of the commission of a crime or gives false information in the official investigation of the commission of a crime, knowing the report or information to be false, commits false informing. Bucher said that is the most common form of false informing that KCSO deputies deal with every year.
If a person gives a false alarm of fire to the fire department of a government entity, knowing the alarm to be false; makes a false request for ambulance; gives a false report concerning a missing child or missing endangered adult; or gives false information in the official investigation of a missing child or endangered adult knowing the report or information is false, they also commit false informing.
If a person makes a complaint against a law enforcement officer to the state or municipality that employs the officer alleging the officer engaged in misconduct while performing the officer’s duties and knowing the complaint to be false, they commit false informing.
If a person makes a false report of a missing person, knowing the report or information is false; or if they give a false report of actions, behavior or conditions concerning a septic tank soil absorption system or constructed wetland septic system as defined in Indiana Code, they commit false informing.
False informing is a Class B misdemeanor, but it becomes a Class A misdemeanor if the false informing “hinders any law enforcement process” or “results in harm to another person.” On the charge, a person can face up to one year in jail and fines of up to $5,000.
Bucher said law enforcement responds to all calls, not knowing until they get there and investigate whether it’s a real case.
“In an investigation, it’s more common to find unfounded cases,” he said. “You can run through the course of different investigations. The statement a person gives, for whatever reason, is false. It might not even be false; there could not be enough substance to it for us to pursue it further.”
As an example of false informing, he said, is when an officer responds to a domestic complaint and one side gives a statement against the other person and that statement turns out to be false.
“I’ve had one, personally, when I worked an investigation, last year where a suspect falsely accused another subject of being part of the crime. And then through the investigations and verifying the stories and everything, looking into it, it was very clear he made a false statement just to try to get another person to go down with him,” Bucher recalled.
Bucher said there is no real reason why the number of people arrested for false informing goes up or down from year to year.
“You catch these people involved in a crime and they want to lie their way out of it, and that’s why law enforcement a lot of times charge them. Instead of taking the responsibility of their actions, they try to beat the system, and all it does is make things worse,” he said.
How much time and tax dollars are wasted because people give false information would be hard to determine, Bucher said. “That’s a case-by-case situation.”
He said a really common thing locally that leads to a person being charged with false informing is when they have a suspended driver’s license so they use another person’s name and/or other information to prevent from going to jail.
“That’s probably what a majority of our false informing cases are, is through traffic stops,” Bucher said.
“A case we had here recently, before I got out of the detective division, we had a robbery and the suspect took the victim’s ID. A few days later, an outside agency stopped that car with the suspect in it and he provided our victim’s identification. And when he ran the identification, there were no warrants. The suspect was wanted for outstanding warrants, but he gave the driver’s license of the other individual. Due to the two of them looking somewhat similar, the officer didn’t notice it and the suspect was able to get away. He was later apprehended a few weeks later. But that’s kind of the common thing, they use someone else’s identification.”
