How often do Utahns make false reports of crimes and why?

Salt Lake City – Hundreds of Utahns lied to the law enforcement authorities in 2024.

From falsehoods to fundamental information such as a name or a date of birth to overall manufacturers of serious accusations that could bear high penalties for the accused – these lies ended up in court.

The legislators of Utah want to know how often false reports about crimes are done. Recently adopted laws, the public prosecutor's office called for this data to submit this data every year from January 2026.

In collaboration with prosecutors and the court system in Utah, the KSL investigators, hundreds of cases in which people made incorrect information to the police throughout the state in 2024.

The findings offer a look at who is lying about crimes in Utah and why.

An extreme example

In January 2024, the police officer from Utah Valley University, Isaac Petersen, saw a sight that he would not easily forget: a man who drove a blue motorcycle with a long blond hair that protruded from his helmet. One of the taillights of the bike was burned out. The exhaust was a pronounced sticker. And the license plate was “idiot”.

“There were really distinguishable factors,” said Petersen. “He made my attention to himself because he waved his arms on his bike while he was driving.”

Petersen tried to pull him after accelerating the man and entered a mutual traffic lane to get past other vehicles, however, the chase ended after the motorcyclist almost driven a UTA bus.

“He almost plowed in the side of this bus,” said Petersen. “He had to maneuver very quickly and jump onto the sidewalk.”

Through the weeks of the examination and searching of traffic cameras to pictures, Petersen learned that the “Idiot” license plate was fake – also a crime – and finally obtained the man in his residence.

“This bike didn't go anywhere for a while,” says the suspect Petersen in body camerasurms.

Petersen first said that the man lied whether he knew who owned the bike. Then he lied around

Whether it was on the road with the forged license plate. And he continued to put on whether he had been the one where Petersen tried to cover it. At some point he saw how he told the officials a few different people who also have long blonde hair that have the keys to his motorcycle.

A year later, he owed himself guilty of driving ruthless driving, not stopping on the command of law enforcement and the disability of the judiciary. As part of the plea, two crime fees were reduced to offenses, and another crime fee for the forging of a license plate was dropped.

“We really tried to work with him, but he just wanted to lie on and, you know, not be cooperative, and it really came to bite him in the butt,” said Petersen. “I think that was one of my most extreme, especially because his lie went to the end.”

It is an extreme example of something that police see every day.

“A contemptuous lover”

“People will lie,” said Justin Cyr, a policewoman of Centerville.

He said these lies are usually low missions, e.g. B. a driver who claims during a traffic stops that they do not know how quickly they went. What is not so common is someone who makes a whole crime.

In August, Cyr met with a man who appeared at the police station to report an impending email that he had received from his ex-girlfriend an hour after the couple had left.

“I'm a kind of fear that she will do something,” said the police man.

Cyr began to examine the case as a nuisance. After telling the man that the content of the e -mail did not increase the level of a crime, the man suddenly received another more threatening e -mail from another account with the name of the former friend. Then it happened again.

“When I informed [the man] The fact that the content of the threats he received would require something like a violent crime -threatened his life -he takes this information, 20 minutes later, a third e -mail, “said Cyr.

Things became even stranger. As soon as the man found out that the investigators wanted to follow the device's IP address that created the e -mail addresses and sent the e -mails, the man suddenly wanted the investigators to fall the case.

Finally the man met Cyr again.

“I didn't send the first one, but I sent the last two. I only admit the first one, because it just gets easier,” the man is added in body camera film material.

“But at that time [he] Still the sending of the first e -mail, ”said Cyr while checking the video of the interaction.

“They framed them for a crime,” what Cyr tells the man.

In the end it was the complainant and not his ex-girlfriend who was ultimately charged with crime.

“This does not always happen where someone fully produces a story,” said Cyr. “In this case we talk about a despised lover, right? They had just separated. It was an apparently bad separation and for some reason he wanted to hurt her. And that's rare.”

395 cases

During this year's legislative period, the legislators passed the HB354 and asked the public prosecutor to report to the state “the number of law enforcement measures in the previous calendar year, in which an indictment was raised on the basis of the false allegation of the individual, from January 2026, a crime or an offense”.

The KSL investigators asked the public prosecutor what charges they could submit against someone who created a wrong report and asked the court system of the US state of Utah for every case submitted in 2024. We received 395 case numbers and looked at everyone.

Not every case included a narrative, but of those who did this were most common in terms of personal information. People often gave the police a fake name or date of birth, often because they had active arrest warrants and tried to avoid arrest that makes 186 – almost half – of the cases.

More than 20 cases concerned people who were concerned during an arrest and said they had accepted harmful drugs. This triggers a trip to the hospital in front of the prison and an additional fee.

When asked why people do this, said Cyr:

With regard to actual false reports, we found 29 cases with different motifs.

For example, a truck was stolen when it was really involved in a crime.

In another case, a man reported a dramatic armed robbery who asked the police to send a dozen units looking for a suspect. When his story did not check out, the police checked his story and found that the man had reported a similar crime in the same place two years earlier that could not be confirmed. When he was confronted, he admitted that he had invented the story in the hope of driving home.

And in a bizarre turn of events, the police came to one scene with two cars on fire. A man from Springville was festive, his own son was responsible for the arson and said civil servants: “We have to get him off the street and I don't care how it happens now.”

Later a dashboard camera picked up when the man made this admission to a friend:

“Yes, I was in the costume. I burned down the cars.”

In any case, the person who reported the invented story was exposed to fees.

What about sexual assault?

The first version of HB354 asked the public prosecutor to collect and report data on false reports on sexual assault, outrage and recoil from surviving sexual survivors, lawyers and experts.

Related history: “damaging” sexual assault language, which was removed from the collection of crime data

The sponsor, MP Ryan Wilcox, R-ogden, said that the distinction was not intended for sexual assault, and he had updated the draft law to request reporting on data on the law enforcement of false reports on all crime.

Nevertheless, the concerns about false reports on sexual assault on the Capitol Hill in Utah occur from time to time, especially if the legislator discusses legislation that aims to hold the perpetrators of sexual violence into account.

In our review of hundreds of cases, the KSL investigators found only one example that included an assertion of sexual attacks.

The Salt Lake City police arrested a woman who wore no pants or underwear, emptied and threw feces on a public sidewalk. While he was booked to prison, the woman claimed that the transport officer had sexually attacked her. Police camera film material was not like that.

These results agree with decades of credible examinations that show that false demands are rare due to sexual attacks – between two and eight percent. Experts say that this is the same wrong reporting rate as any other kind of crime.

“The truth generally comes out”

With regard to the law enforcement agencies, both Petersen and CYR found that the time, the further investigation of false statements, took advantage of valuable police resources.

“If someone finds a story, the question increases, this reduces my trust in people later? I hope not,” said Cyr. “Will I be exhausted? Will I be cynical? We're not trying to be.”

He said that if the man claimed that he had impending e -mails in the future with the same report, he would seriously examine the claims.

“There is something bigger from this,” said Cyr. “I have to take what a suspected victim says about nominal value.”

“We don't see many people who are just lying about the crime,” said Greg Skordas, right -analyst from KSL.

Skordas said Utahns should comfort themselves if they know that those who were charged with law enforcement agencies in 2024 were not drawn to the system.

“I think people should be very confident in the criminal justice system that the truth is generally coming out, even though people could mislead the prosecution,” he said.

Have you experienced something you think is just not right? The KSL investigators want to help. Send your tip at investigations@ksl.com or 385-707-6153 so that we can work for you.