By Cynthia Grau/WJEZ News

Reports of scary clowns have been running rampant across the United States, even popping up in Illinois. In this three-part series, we will address the consequences of dressing up as a clown to terrorize people, the consequences of filing a false police report just to scare people that these clowns have been seen in the area, and finally, differentiating between these clowns and the innocent Halloween night clowns.

Pontiac Police Major Dan Davis explained that as of yesterday afternoon, only one call had been made to the police about one of these clowns, and the report was unsubstantiated. Davis explained what could potentially happen to a person who decided to dress up as one of these scary clowns with the intent of terrorizing people.

“This year, the trend seems to be dressing up as a clown all across the country and people are taking it a little to the extreme of not just your standard Halloween pranks and scaring people, but really just terrifying people. Unfortunately, these incidents involve trespassing and threats of violence. They aren’t going to be tolerated. Thankfully, we haven’t seen any clown calls to this degree yet, but I guess, fair warning – if people want to employ these tactics and dress up as a clown just to absolutely terrorize somebody, there’s a very good chance you will spend Halloween in jail,” Davis said.

The next two parts of the series will air leading up to Halloween.