HARTFORD — A former Hartford police officer who resigned after an internal investigation showed he falsified records of about 200 traffic stops has been arrested.

Hartford police arrested Michael R. Fallon Tuesday, charging him with perjury, second-degree forgery and computer crime, court records show. The forgery and perjury charges are Class D felonies; computer crime is a Class B misdemeanor.

Fallon was released on a written promise to appear in state Superior Court in Hartford on Oct. 11.

"Based on a thorough and complete investigation by the Hartford police internal affairs division, it was determined that criminal charges were appropriate," said Lt. Aaron Boisvert, a spokesperson for the Hartford Police Department. "An arrest warrant was applied for and approved by a judge of the Superior Court."

Fallon turned himself in at the Hartford Police Department, Boisvert said.

Hartford Police Department officials discovered during a routine audit that Fallon, a member of the Traffic Division, "had irregularities in his reported traffic stops" from mid-December 2022 to mid-January 2023, according to police records and a statement Hartford Police Chief Jason Thody sent to CT Insider in August.

When confronted about those discrepancies at a meeting, Fallon "admitted to the sergeants that he purposely lied on his activity reports to embellish his activities" and said "his reason for doing so was that he did not want to disappoint his supervisors with a limited amount of activity," according to department records.

A subsequent internal affairs investigation found that during 2022, Fallon "overreported" 195 traffic stops and 31 infractions on his weekly departmental activity reports, completed 33 traffic stop forms inaccurately or for stops that did not occur and failed to activate his body-worn camera during certain stops when he was required to do so, according to a memo summarizing the investigation's findings.

The memo also describes in detail how Fallon lied about a traffic stop in January 2022 when applying for an arrest warrant.

According to the arrest warrant application, Fallon allegedly said he had stopped a car and was approaching it when it took off, after which he called in the license plate. But location data for Fallon's cruiser showed he pursued the car on a high-speed chase along Interstate 91, reaching speeds up to 115 mph, before stopping the pursuit and calling the stop in to dispatch, according to the memo.

The court canceled the warrant upon hearing of the discrepancies and the driver was not arrested.

Fallon resigned March 6.

His father, Michael J. Fallon, was an assistant Hartford police chief until 2006, when he took over as chief of the Connecticut State Capitol Police Department. The elder Fallon died in 2009, according to an online obituary.

The Hartford Police Department is the third Connecticut law enforcement agency to uncover officers falsifying traffic stop records in recent years.

In February 2022, Norwalk Police Officer Edgar Gonzalez was arrested after investigators found he created more than 30 fake traffic tickets over a four-month span, records show. The case remains pending in court. Norwalk police said Gonzalez resigned after the department launched an internal probe and officials did not know what motivated him to fabricate the tickets.

The most high-profile allegations of ticket falsification surround the Connecticut State Police.

CT Insider reported in August 2022 that state police officials had caught four troopers intentionally making up tickets for traffic stops that never happened.

That triggered an agency-wide audit that found hundreds of state troopers may have submitted thousands of false or inaccurate tickets between 2014 and 2021. Because most of the allegedly false tickets identified drivers as white, they likely skewed racial profiling data, auditors found.