Hack reveals Kansas City’s undercover police crime list

In 2011, after After months of complaints from residents about the department’s SWAT team — broken TVs, missing cash, missing electronics, even a stolen porn video — the Kansas City, Kansas, police department, with the help of the FBI, launched an undercover operation to root out the department’s lying and thieving cops. They called it Operation Sticky Fingers.

On Jan. 6, Selective Crime Reduction Enforcement Unit officers served a search warrant at a rental home that carefully turned up thousands of dollars in electronics, weed and cash, unaware that the home was wired with hidden cameras embedded in their alarm clocks and smoke detectors. The trick worked. Cameras captured the 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 cops involved singled out a fourth SCORE officer not captured by the hidden cameras: Jeff Gardner, the man KCKPD investigators learned had recently punched his girlfriend so hard in the jaw that she required medical attention.

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

Only with the words of these three discredited officers, the prosecutor refused to press charges. But in a memo to then-Chief, District Attorney Rick Armstrong, he warned that any future police work with Gardner — whether detectives, arrests or testimony — should be viewed with deep suspicion. At the end of this note it is stated: “It is unlikely that we will build a case that is an important part of his testimony.”

The memo placed Gardner on a highly classified whistleblower list, commonly known as the Giglio List, which Giglio v. United Statesa 1972 decision that required prosecutors to disclose any information that might impeach the credibility of their witnesses. In the case of the 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 prosecution.

Nevertheless, 15 years later, Gardner still works for the KCKPD. He is one of 62 current and former officers who have committed discreditable offenses that may be required to be reported to the court if called to testify.

Gardner did not respond to a request for comment.