On Thursday, July 5, at 10:41 p.m. officers of the Santa Monica Police Department were on routine patrol in the 1500 block of Michigan Avenue when they saw a woman on a bicycle traveling eastbound in the westbound lanes.
This is in violation of the California Vehicle Code 21650.1 (clearly!), so the officers stopped the woman.
The woman, after being spoken to by the officers, told them an approximation of her name, and added that she was bereft of any form of identification upon her person.
The officers asked the woman if she would mind if they searched her, and she said that she would not, so they did.
The officers then looked inside her bag and discovered a fraudulent California Drivers License that was in another woman’s name, but the suspect had stuck her own photograph over the original one.
The officers also found two checks with the other woman’s name on them.
This 24-year-old resident of Santa Monica was arrested and charged with possession of bad checks, possession of blank checks for the purpose of fraud, and forgery.
Bail was set at $20,000.
Editor’s Note: These reports are part of a regular police coverage series entitled “Alert Police Blotter” (APB), which injects some minor editorial into certain police activities in Santa Monica. Not all of the Mirror’s coverage of incidents involving police are portrayed in this manner. More serious crimes and police-related activities are regularly reported without editorial in the pages of the Santa Monica Mirror and its website, smmirror.com.
