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In 2011, after months of complaints from residents about the department’s SWAT team—broken TVs, missing cash, lost electronics, even a stolen pornographic video—the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department launched an undercover sting with help from the FBI to root out the department’s lying and stealing cops. They called it Operation Sticky Fingers.
On January 6, Selective Crime Occurrence Reduction Enforcement Unit officers served a search warrant at a rented house, carefully staged with thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics, weed, and cash, unaware that the house was wired with hidden cameras embedded into an alarm clock and smoke detector, recording their every move. The ruse worked. Cameras captured three officers stealing video games, an Apple iPod, headphones, and $640 in cash. All three were fired and charged federally with conspiracy, deprivation of civil rights, and theft of government property.
In interviews with investigators, however, the three implicated cops singled out a fourth SCORE officer, not captured by the hidden cameras: Jeff Gardner, a man who KCKPD investigators found had recently punched his girlfriend in the jaw so hard that she needed medical attention.
According to his fellow officers, Gardner had a history of smashing TVs during raids, stealing video games, and even one time swiping a bag of crab legs. “You can’t catch me unless you catch me on video,” an officer told prosecutors that he recalled Gardner once saying.
With only the word of these three discredited officers, 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 we would file a case that is based in significant part on his testimony,” the memo concluded.
The memo placed Gardner on the department’s highly secret Veracity Disclosure List, commonly known as a Giglio List, which refers to Giglio v. United States, a 1972 decision which established that the prosecution must disclose any information that might question the credibility of its witnesses. In KCKPD’s case, this is a roster 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.
Nevertheless, 15 years later, Gardner still works at KCKPD. He is among 62 current and former officers who engaged in misconduct so damaging to their credibility that, if called to testify, it may need to be reported to the courts.
Gardner did not respond to a request for comment.
