Romney Once Impersonated a Police Officer

The National Memo, a national news website, reported that when he was a teenager, Mitt Romney would routinely don a cop uniform and use it to pull over his friends. The Memo reports that he had boasted about it to his friends and once even called two or three of them into his room and showed his uniform off.
The Real Romney, a book published by two Boston Globe writers, recounts that he once put a siren on top of his car and chased down two of his friends who were driving around with their dates.
In many states, including Romney’s boyhood state of Michigan, it is a crime to impersonate a police officer.
The incident by Romney brings back memories of two incidents in Worth County of teens impersonating police officers. Several years ago, as reported in the Quad River News, three Worth County teens found a cop uniform and patrolled the roads of Worth County one night flagging down cars for traffic violations and telling people that they were “helping out the Sheriff’s Department.”
We have personal memories of such a prank. Back in 1982, Joe Stark was the editor of the Times-Tribune and he drove a pea green Fiat recognizable by everyone. Joe was a hit among the teens, who called him “Smokin’ Joe,” a name that stuck as late as the early 2000’s. They would regularly stop and talk to  him, even putting egg all over his windshield Halloween Night. We were coming home from a ballgame late one night when some teens cruising around saw Joe and had a siren handy and flashed the siren for him to stop. Joe was not fooled.