The Name Game

The other day I was working S.T.E.P., which is traffic enforcement and is overtime (woohooo). While riding around looking for traffic violations I saw a man run a stop sign in right in front of me. In fact he looked right at me and ran the stop sign while turning right.

I followed him and stopped him as he pulled in a parking lot. I made contact with him and asked him for his license. He said he did not have it so I asked him his name and birth date. He gave me a name and birth date. I asked him how old he was and the age did not match with his birth date. Being a seasoned officer this made me think he was lying to me.

I returned to my car and had dispatch check him for warrants under the name and date of birth he gave me. While I was doing this a female walked up and started to talk to the driver. Police officers do not like this and I told her to come to me. Then I asked her her friend’s name. She game me a different name than he had.

I had dispatch check the name the girl had given me and found that we had dealt with him before, and that he had a traffic warrant. I then went up to the driver and called him by the name the girl had given me. He answered by that name. I asked him why he was answering to the name I called him if his name was the name he had given me.

I then had him get out of his car and arrested him for his warrant as well as fail to identify-fugitive since he was wanted. Both of those are misdemeanors. It turned out the name and birth date he had originally given me were his brothers. That made his lying to me another offense, fraudulent use of identifying information, which is a felony. When I told him this he was not very happy. He went from possibly going to jail for a traffic warrant to having two additional charges including a felony.