In 2011, after months of complaints from residents in regards to 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 known as it Operation Sticky Fingers.
On January 6, Selective Crime Prevalence Discount Enforcement Unit officers served a search warrant at a rented home, fastidiously staged with 1000’s of {dollars}’ price 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 have been fired and charged federally with conspiracy, deprivation of civil rights, and theft of presidency property.
In interviews with investigators, nevertheless, 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 just lately punched his girlfriend within the jaw so laborious that she wanted medical consideration.
In keeping with 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 possibly can’t catch me except you catch me on video,” an officer instructed prosecutors that he recalled Gardner as soon as saying.
With solely the phrase of those three discredited officers, prosecutors declined to press fees. 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—must be considered with deep suspicion. “It could be extremely unlikely we might file a case that’s primarily based in vital half on his testimony,” the memo concluded.
The memo positioned Gardner on the division’s extremely secret Veracity Disclosure Record, generally referred to as a Giglio Record, which refers to Giglio v. United States, a 1972 determination which established that the prosecution should disclose any info that may query the credibility of its witnesses. In KCKPD’s case, it is a roster of officers whose credibility could also be so compromised that the division believes their involvement in legal instances, whether or not by way of testimony, arrests, or investigative work, might jeopardize prosecutions.
Nonetheless, 15 years later, Gardner nonetheless works at KCKPD. He’s amongst 62 present and former officers who engaged in misconduct so damaging to their credibility that, if known as to testify, it could have to be reported to the courts.
Gardner didn’t reply to a request for remark.
