Hack exposes list of undercover police misconduct in Kansas City

And in 2011, after Months of complaints from residents about the department’s SWAT team — broken televisions, missing money, missing electronic devices, even a stolen pornographic video — the Kansas City, Kan., police department launched an undercover FBI-assisted campaign to crack down on lying and stealing cops in the department. They called it Operation Sticky Fingers.

On January 6, Selective Incident Reduction Enforcement Unit officers served a search warrant at a rental home, carefully arranged with thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics, weed and cash, unaware that the home was equipped with hidden cameras built into an alarm clock and smoke detector, recording their every move. The trick worked. Cameras captured three officers stealing video games, an Apple iPod, headphones and $640 in cash. The three were fired and charged with federal charges of conspiracy, deprivation of civil rights and theft of government property.

However, in interviews with investigators, the three cops involved identified a fourth SCORE officer, who was not captured on hidden cameras: Jeff Gardner, the man who KCKPD investigators discovered had recently punched his girlfriend in the jaw so hard that she required medical attention.

According to his fellow officers, Gardner had a history of smashing televisions during raids, stealing video games, and even stealing a bag of crab legs once. One officer told prosecutors he remembered Gardner once saying, “You can’t arrest me unless you catch me on video.”

With the words of these three discredited officers alone, prosecutors refused to press charges. But in a memo to then-Police Chief Rick Armstrong, the prosecutor warned that any future police work involving Gardner — whether detective work, arrests or testimony — should be viewed with deep suspicion. “It would be highly unlikely that we would prosecute a case based in large part on his testimony,” the memorandum concluded.

The memo placed Gardner on the department’s top-secret fact-disclosure list, known as the Giglio List, which indicates Giglio v. United Statesa decision issued in 1972 stipulating that the prosecution must disclose any information that might cast doubt on the credibility of its witnesses. In the case of KCKPD, this is a list of officers whose credibility may be so compromised that the department believes their involvement in criminal cases, whether through testimony, arrests or investigative work, could jeopardize prosecutions.

However, 15 years later, Gardner still works for KCKPD. He is among 62 current and former officers who have engaged in misconduct that has damaged their credibility to the point where, if called to give evidence, it may need to be reported to the courts.

Gardner did not respond to a request for comment.