Officer Bob

Oh sure, nobody likes the police.  But there’s always somebody looking to be the police, even when they don’t have no badge, no paycheck, and no right to be knocking down doors.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s guys who pretend to be cops.  There’s a fine line between being a runaway cop and being a runaway fake cop.  This guy in a little town called Gerald, Missouri who called himself “Sergeant Bill”  was no real cop.

Sure, he had the attitude, and he liked to shove people around.  And he was so good at it, he even convinced the local real cops that he was legit.  The mayor, too.

When it turned out he was just a convicted sex offender from the town down the road, three real officers lost their jobs.

The people this guy busted protested when he came into thier homes, talkin about a search warrant.  This guy, he cracks me up, he says “I don’t need no search warrant, I’m a federal agent”

Oh man, I gotta remember that one.

GERALD, Mo. - Like so many rural communities in the country’s middle, this small town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up.

Arrests began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood — mainly from television — to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s anti-drug campaign abruptly fell apart after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding minister and a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

Jakob, 36, is the subject of a criminal investigation by federal authorities, and he is likely to face charges related to impersonating a law-enforcement officer, his lawyer said.