In 2011, after months of complaints from residents about the division’s SWAT team—damaged TVs, lacking money, misplaced electronics, even a stolen pornographic video—the Kansas Metropolis, Kansas, Police Division launched an undercover sting with assist from the FBI to root out the division’s mendacity and stealing cops. They referred to as it Operation Sticky Fingers.
On January 6, Selective Crime Prevalence Discount Enforcement Unit officers served a search warrant at a rented home, rigorously staged with hundreds of {dollars}’ value of electronics, weed, and money, unaware that the home was wired with hidden cameras embedded into an alarm clock and smoke detector, recording their each transfer. The ruse labored. Cameras captured three officers stealing video video games, an Apple iPod, headphones, and $640 in money. All three had been fired and charged federally with conspiracy, deprivation of civil rights, and theft of presidency property.
In interviews with investigators, nonetheless, the three implicated cops singled out a fourth SCORE officer, not captured by the hidden cameras: Jeff Gardner, a person who KCKPD investigators discovered had not too long ago punched his girlfriend in the jaw so onerous that she wanted medical consideration.
In accordance to his fellow officers, Gardner had a historical past of smashing TVs throughout raids, stealing video video games, and even one time swiping a bag of crab legs. “You’ll be able to’t catch me until you catch me on video,” an officer informed prosecutors that he recalled Gardner as soon as saying.
With solely the phrase of those three discredited officers, prosecutors declined to press prices. However in a memo to then-chief Rick Armstrong, the district lawyer warned that any future police work involving Gardner—whether or not detective work, arrests, or testimony—ought to be seen with deep suspicion. “It might be extremely unlikely we’d file a case that is based mostly in important half on his testimony,” the memo concluded.
The memo positioned Gardner on the division’s extremely secret Veracity Disclosure Listing, generally often called a Giglio Listing, which refers to Giglio v. United States, a 1972 choice which established that the prosecution should disclose any information which may query the credibility of its witnesses. In KCKPD’s case, this is a roster of officers whose credibility could also be so compromised that the division believes their involvement in legal circumstances, whether or not by means of testimony, arrests, or investigative work, might jeopardize prosecutions.
However, 15 years later, Gardner nonetheless works at KCKPD. He is amongst 62 present and former officers who engaged in misconduct so damaging to their credibility that, if referred to as to testify, it could want to be reported to the courts.
Gardner did not reply to a request for remark.
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