Dear Editor,
 
Lying is something we are all taught at a young age to be a bad thing, but currently in the state of Missouri, verbally lying about your identity to a law official has no consequences. In the article recently published in your paper titled “Proposed bill could make lying to police about identity illegal” by Kelsey Maffett, this issue is brought to many college students’ attention, including mine. Before reading this article, I was under the assumption that it is always illegal to lie about identity to a police officer, whether it is verbally or with fake identification, and I think most college students have the same assumption as me.

Even though a city ordinance in Columbia makes lying about identity to a police officer illegal, the state of Missouri doesn’t have this law. The proposed bill HB 1292 I feel is a worthy bill to be brought to the public’s attention because it addresses this problem. It would make it illegal in the state of Missouri to lie about identity to an officer in any way. In my opinion, it is morally unacceptable to lie about your identity, whether it is in written or verbal form so I strongly support this bill. I think the state of Missouri should have this law so the consequences of lying to a police officer are consistent across the state.

College students like consistency, so if we already assume that this is an illegal thing to do in our college town of Columbia, it would only make sense for it to be illegal in other college towns we visit as well. If this bill is to pass, there will be consequences for those who choose to verbally lie about their identity. This would be a good thing for the state of Missouri because it could help prevent things like identity theft and also it would help police officers out because people would know for sure that what they are doing is illegal if they choose to lie about their identity in any way.

Thank you for your time,

Natalie Uthlaut
noumvd@mail.missouri.edu