Kid Cop Returns (Again and Again)
As a teenager, Vincent Richardson became a Chicago legend after successfully impersonating a police officer. He got caught — so why did he do it over and over? Well, when you’re really good at something...Share this story
Or at least that was the official narrative at the time: while Vincent had pulled one over on the Windy City and its police department, it was just one embarrassing police shift, five hours long. And then it was over. “When you train to be a cop, they train you to stand big,” he said. “You stand bigger than you stand tall.”
“I was like, ‘What am I gonna do?’” he said. “This is all I basically did my whole time. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to be a teenager.” At 28, he wore a prison-issue white polo shirt, dark blue knockoff Dickies, and white canvas slip-on shoes. But I really can’t stress it enough: what you notice immediately about Vincent is how much bigger he seems than he actually is. He claims he’s 5’5”, but he’s not even that tall. Still, broad chest and shoulders, he looks tough — the man understands posture and how to look strong and confident and like he belongs wherever he stands.
When Vincent met up with his new partner, they threw him cruiser keys and told him to pull the car around. So he did. In another, Vincent said he and his partner got a call about an open-air drug deal. The suspect they located resisted arrest and attempted to flee. Vincent and his partner wrestled the suspect to the ground, got them into handcuffs, and brought them back to the station in the back seat of the cruiser. When they arrived, Vincent said he told his shift captain about the difficulty of the arrest. The captain, Vincent claimed, decided that the perp needed to be taught a lesson.
There are no records indicating that Vincent impersonated an officer for three weeks instead of five hours. Or that he made any of the stops he described. Or that the accusation he made about his captain initiating a “rough ride” is real. Vincent had described it to me in detail from the visitation room of Big Muddy prison. Months later, speaking on the phone with a fact checker, he denied it happened.
“So he brings me into his office and sits me down, and I start trying to explain, and he says, ‘Shut the fuck up,’” Vincent recalled. “Then he tells me what’s gonna happen next.” Both the official power he tasted as a temporary cop and the unusual notoriety he received afterward left him wanting more. Before his arrest, he felt bored. Now he was really bored. Go to school. Come home. Do homework. Eat dinner. Find something to do until bed. Sleep and repeat.
On a Tuesday afternoon, July 24th, 2013, Vincent walked into an Englewood uniform shop and told the clerk that he was a Chicago police officer. Wearing dark blue pants like an officer’s, he put his wallet on the checkout counter and gave the clerk his driver’s license. He was 19 at the time and said he wanted to try on cargo shorts and a duty belt.
. A felony this time, he faced three years behind bars. The officers took him to Cook County Jail. He couldn’t post bond, so he stayed there until November that year when a judge sentenced him to 18 months in prison.
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