Before we met, I half expected Vincent Richardson, the so-called “kid cop,” to be some pint-sized mastermind, a young evil genius bent on world domination.
I came up with a dozen nutty theories about Richardson — who in 2009 famously posed as a cop at a South Side police station, driving a squad car and even making an arrest before police busted him. He was 14.
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Richardson, now 22, recently spent 11 months in jail before pleading guilty to his third police impersonation charge — this time for being in possession of policelike gear during a May 2015 traffic stop. That news sprung loose a well of memories about the young man whose story I doggedly pursued for five years.
In the whirlwind of crime, cops and teenager stories I’ve covered over 15 years, Richardson’s tale was in a galaxy of its own.
He was an anomaly: a shy, undersized Englewood boy with wide eyes, broad shoulders and peach fuzz who more than anything wanted to be a cop when many young men of color across the country are expressing discomfort or outright distrust of law enforcement.
It wasn’t an act. When he finally spoke to me about the famous incident, he often talked about “being on both sides” of the badge, as both a cop and a civilian. He expressed support both for officers working the beat and young men caught up in a web of aggressive policing. He talked comfortably about the allure of being in a “law enforcement family.”
After his second police impersonation arrest in 2013, he told his arresting officers: “I know what it’s like to be one of you. I respect you because I did it for a day, chasing and helping people. My intentions are never to hurt people, just to help.”
Richardson wasn’t some hulking high school footballer who could easily pass for 30; or a crook looking to rob motorists he had pulled over. When we finally spoke, Richardson didn’t come off like a brash talker or a smooth charmer like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Frank Abagnale in “Catch Me If You Can.”
The oldest of three sons raised by a single mother, Richardson said exposure to a youth police Explorer club at the Englewood police station and the older male officers changed his life.
But surely no one expected that he’d parlay his Explorer club lessons and his intense drive to prove himself into the hoax of all hoaxes in successfully passing himself off as a cop.
“I feel like honestly that I was put on Earth to make my community safer, and I saw an opportunity and I feel like that was my destiny,” he told me in December 2014.
He described how the nervousness he felt walking into the Grand Crossing police station that cold January day melted away after an officer escorted him to a station’s locker room. Within hours he’d be behind the wheel of a squad car driving the streets of Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood.
A real cop, a police captain once told me, can usually sniff out a fake cop in three questions or less. The fact that he had succeeded where so many other older and savvier adults had failed and did so without setting off any alarms — not even with his adult partner during his five and a half hour deception — only added to the story’s mystique.
Impostors, especially teenage ones, aren’t actually that uncommon. Last December, an 18-year-old Ohio man convinced school officials in Sycamore that he was a state lawmaker and gave a lecture to a high school American Government class. In February, a 23-year-old Ukrainian national in Pennsylvania on an expired tourist visa was exposed for posing as a high school student who earned a spot on the National Honor Society and was a lieutenant in the Navy Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps.
In Florida, two separate teenagers in recent years have duped people into thinking they were doctors working at medical centers. One 18-year-old went further, convincing investors to fund his “holistic medical clinic” in West Palm Beach where he gave physical exams and medical advice before he was busted, according to the Sun-Sentinel.
It would seem that young impostors lack the fear of consequences that an older person might have. A University of Chicago pediatric psychologist once told me that some young impostors are trying to project success to the outside world to combat deep-seated self-esteem issues.
Richardson said in an interview that he had suffered emotional issues in his youth but was determined to work through them. And when I checked in on him in the summer of 2014, it appeared his luck had turned for the better.
Out of jail for just three months, Richardson was working two jobs, one in security, which he loved. Over lunch that Sunday in late July, he talked of his plans for a new life. If things continued to go well, he would quit his part-time McDonald’s job and do security full time and use his earnings to buy a car. From there he would consider enlisting in the Army, or going into bodyguard work. For the first time in years, he felt like he had options.
After lunch he asked if I wanted to shadow him at his job that day working security at Northerly Island for a Phish concert. Not long into his shift, his guard and his innate shyness began to fall away and I saw the chemistry he had with his co-workers, relaxed and cracking jokes. His bond with a supervisor — a burly older Hispanic gentleman with a Marine-grade buzz cut — caught my attention.
With the older man watching as he directed traffic on winding roads, Richardson seemed to beam with confidence in his boss’ presence at the same time he sought the man’s reassurance that he was doing a good job. “Just be patient,” I recall the supervisor telling Richardson, a smile on his face.
It was a sweet, genuine little moment that showed his potential. Now he has another opportunity to start over if he can avoid trouble until his parole ends next March.
This time, I hope, it’s for real.
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