Don’t Lie To the Police, Or Your Mom, Ryan Lochte

(Update, 9/8: USA Swimming and the U.S. Olympic Committee have suspended Ryan Lochte for 10 months due to his lying. He is banned from domestic and international competition until June 30, 2017; the other three U.S. swimmers implicated alongside him each received four month suspensions.)

It’s a story that just got stranger and stranger as the clock turned, but now that all the details appear to have come out and the dust has settled, it’s safe to say that Ryan Lochte probably should not have lied; to the police or to his mother. His swimming buddy had to pay almost $11,000 just to leave the country (after being pulled off his flight) and Lochte himself is under investigation. He may very well even be under indictment, if Brazil wants to go through with that process. His interview with Matt Lauer is a masterclass in topic avoidance, and a prime example of someone working in vocabulary they just learned from their lawyer hours before going on television.

It’s something almost all of us were taught just as a matter of principle when we weren’t more than a few years old. But, as a lot of the country is witnessing, you can get yourself in a mountain of legal trouble if you lie to law enforcement, especially when you are visiting another country.

what’s the penalty for lying to police?

Lying, or filing a false report, to police is too great of a risk to take. Many states will seek jail time and/or thousands of dollars in fines for doing this. Penalties differ slightly in each state, so we put together an easy-to-read table. Fine amounts and jail time represent the maximum penalty possible for knowingly making a false statement to a law enforcement officer. It should be noted that we are only covering false incident reports/statements to police, not including a false bomb threat; perjury happens in a court of law and is a subject for another time.

States have definitions of false reporting that are equal parts specific, vague or . Many times, the fine and/or jail sentence will vary depending on what was being lied about; if you falsely claim that your bike was stolen, rather than just that you lost it, your penalty probably won’t be very steep. But if you lie about having a gun pointed to your head by a police officer, like our man-child Olympic champion Ryan Lochte, you may be in deeper trouble.

In short, if you give false information related to a misdemeanor crime, you’ll be charged with a misdemeanor; if you give false information related to a felony, you’ll be charged with the same. If you give false information which then leads to someone being injured or worse, your sentence will increase dramatically.

So the lesson here is, don’t lie to the police, ever. Don’t even think about lying to the police. Lies are tough to keep track of; telling the truth means you won’t have to go on TV and apologize for lying while your publicist writes a carefully worded statement trying to absolve you of responsibility. It will be interesting to see whether Brazil presses charges against Ryan Lochte for his crime.

*Featured image from Chan-Fan, via Wiki Commons