Hack Exposes Kansas City’s Secret Police Misconduct List

In 2011, later Months of complaints from residents about the department swat team—broken TVs, lost cash, lost electronics, even a stolen pornographic video—launched an undercover sting with the help of the Kansas City, Kansas, police department. The FBI To root out lying and thieving cops in the department. They call it Operation Sticky Fingers.

On January 6, Selective Crime Reduction Enforcement Unit officers served a search warrant at a rental home, carefully staged with thousands of dollars worth of electronics, weed and cash, unaware that the home had hidden cameras embedded in an alarm clock and smoke detectors recording their every move. The trick worked. Three officers caught on camera stealing video games, an Apple iPod, headphones and $640 in cash. All three were fired and Charged federally Conspiracy, deprivation of civil rights and theft of government property.

In interviews with investigators, however, the three involved cops singled out a fourth score of officers, not caught on hidden cameras: Jeff Gardner, a man KCKPD investigators found had recently punched his girlfriend so hard in the jaw that she required medical attention.

According to his fellow officers, Gardner had a history of breaking TVs, stealing video games and even once swiping a bag of crab legs during the raid. “You can’t catch me if you don’t catch me on video,” one officer told prosecutors he thought Gardner once said.

On the word of these three disgraced officers alone, prosecutors declined to press charges. But in a memo to then-Chief Rick Armstrong, the district attorney 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 file a case that is substantial based on his testimony,” the memo concluded.

The memo places Gardner on the department’s top-secret declassification list, commonly known as the Giglio List, which specifies Giglio v. United StatesA 1972 decision that established that the prosecution must disclose any information that might call into question the credibility of its witnesses. In KCKPD’s case, this is a list of officers whose credibility may be so compromised that the department believes that their involvement in a criminal case, whether through testimony, arrests or investigative work, could jeopardize the prosecution.

Nevertheless, 15 years later, Gardner still works for the KCKPD. He is among 62 current and former officials who have engaged in misconduct so damaging to their credibility that, if called to testify, a court could be required to report.

Gardner did not respond to requests for comment.