In Aesop’s “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” telling fake stories resulted in dire consequences for everyone involved; at Bradley, falsifying events also results in serious consequences: felonies.
Bradley University Police Department Chief Brian Joschko said instances of Bradley students filing false police reports occur every year.
The most recent fabricated police report was filed two weeks ago, according to Joschko. It involved a Bradley student telling officers her car had been vandalized in a campus visitor’s lot.
After an investigation by BUPD officers concluded the alleged crime had not occurred in that location, the student changed her story to say the vandalization to her vehicle occurred on Fredonia Avenue. Yet again, officers were able to conclude the crime had not occurred on there.
According to Joschko, it was at that point that officers knew the student had filed a false report.
“When confronted with the evidence that it didn’t happen [on Fredonia], she finally said that it was a traffic accident at another location,” Joschko said “She clearly lied throughout the investigation, so we arrested her for obstructing and filing a false police report.”
Filing a false police report is a class four felony, according to the Illinois General Assembly. Joschko said false police reports are considered felonies because these investigations waste the police department resources, which could be used for legitimate crimes.
“In this particular case, we invested a substantial amount of man hours reviewing video, reviewing card access, going to a number of alleged crime scenes, trying to track this down [and] conducting a number of interviews,” Joschko said. “That is all time that easily could have been spent … doing other proactive things and maybe preventing some other crime that happened on campus. Because this particular student chose to lie … we ended up arresting her and sending her to the county jail and forwarded [the case] to the state attorney’s office so that it could be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
And the repercussions for filing a false report and being charged with a felony will be experienced throughout life, according to Joschko.
“I had a person contact the police department [in the early ‘90s], she was apparently drinking at a fraternity party, drank too much, … became ill [and] officers evaluated her,” Joschko said. “She ended up being transported to the hospital, and she received an underage drinking citation. She contacted us within the last month trying to get a copy of that because now she is trying to adopt a child, and she was concerned [that information] was going to come back because technically it falls as an arrest … She still now has to disclose [this].”
Even if the violation is expunged from a person’s record, all of the information is recorded on their conduct file, which is something that is looked into on background checks by employers, according to Joschko.
“You could be 30 years down the road at 50 [years old] and the vice president of some company, and now you’re explaining to your boss how you lied in some report that maybe wasn’t caught on the initial background, but it will get caught at some point,” Joschko said. “It’s going to come back, and it’s going to haunt you. That’s the piece of this that I just wish our students fully understood.”
Officers are trained to detect false police reports and can tell when the evidence does not reflect the alleged crime, Joschko said. Last summer, a young man attempted to buy drugs in the East Bluff when he was robbed of his phone and money. The man then reported he was the victim of an armed robbery on campus.
“In this particular incident, it was pretty easy to realize that there is no way that this happened the way that it was alleged,” Joschko said. “Eventually, it comes out that in this case, the individual was buying drugs. That’s not the first time we have heard stuff like that. The officers are not naive.”
Joschko said officers can easily tell when someone is deceiving them.
“We spend a lot of time training officers and sending them to specialty school to tell when people are being deceptive,” Joschko said. “The officers are very skilled at that. They can tell when somebody is not being truthful.”
Joschko said a case from August 2014 had a widespread effect on the Bradley community.
“A female student claimed that she was the victim of an armed robbery at the 800 block of Underhill [Street], where she was approached by a guy with a knife,” Joschko said. “In that case, we actually issued out a safety alert … and it caused significant anxiety amongst the students, parents, faculty and staff. And it turns out that [the report] was completely fabricated in an attempt to get attention.”
Lying to police or giving false information is a matter that should not be taken lightly, either, Joschko said.
“Filing a false police report or knowingly making false statements to a police officer, any police officer … is a crime,” Joschko said. “Those are the types of crimes that police officers and state’s attorney’s offices typically like to see prosecuted because it is wasting the time of the department, and it’s wasting the money of the citizens of Peoria, or in our case … wasting the university’s money. When we have that type of waste, we are not going to sit idly by. We are going to ensure that we take action.”
