In 2011, after months of complaints from residents concerning the division’s SWAT staff—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 Incidence Discount Enforcement Unit officers served a search warrant at a rented home, fastidiously 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 within the jaw so arduous that she wanted medical consideration.
Based on 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 advised 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 seen with deep suspicion. “It could be extremely unlikely we’d file a case that’s based mostly in vital half on his testimony,” the memo concluded.
The memo positioned Gardner on the division’s extremely secret Veracity Disclosure Record, generally generally known 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, this can be a roster of officers whose credibility could also be so compromised that the division believes their involvement in felony 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’s amongst 62 present and former officers who engaged in misconduct so damaging to their credibility that, if known as to testify, it could must be reported to the courts.
Gardner didn’t reply to a request for remark.