Police sergeant planted BB gun on man run over by officers, indictment says

A former Baltimore police sergeant has been accused of planting a BB gun on a suspect after another officer intentionally ran him over, prosecutors said.

The charges also led the Baltimore Police Department to suspend three current officers pending an internal investigation, the department’s acting commissioner, Michael Harrison, said.

A fourth officer listed in the indictment who had already been suspended will also be investigated.

Mr Harrison called the allegations against Keith Gladstone and the other officers “beyond disturbing.”

The charges and suspensions are the latest scandal to shake the city’s Police Department following the death of Freddie Gray, a scathing Justice Department investigation and one of the highest murder rates in the US.

The sergeant who ran over the suspect in 2014, as well as six other officers in the department’s hard-charging Gun Trace Task Force, were charged with racketeering in 2017 in a high-profile case.

The sergeant accused of planting the BB gun, Keith A Gladstone, has pleaded not guilty to all three counts of the indictment, his lawyer said.

Gladstone, 51, was released from custody without bail, the lawyer said.

In the indictment, which was announced by the US attorney’s office for the District of Maryland, prosecutors said Gladstone also told an officer to lie about the 2014 episode if questioned by federal investigators. Several officers were involved or witnessed the events, it claimed.

The lawyer for Gladstone, David B Irwin, said he was still reviewing the charges and had no immediate comment.

If convicted, Gladstone would face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for the conspiracy to violate civil rights; a maximum of five years in prison for conspiracy to commit offences against the US and a maximum of 20 years in prison for witness tampering.

“Prosecuting criminals who work in police agencies is essential both to protect our communities and to support the many honourable officers whose reputations they unfairly tarnish,” Robert K Hur, the US attorney for Maryland, said in a statement. “This is not about policing, it is about a criminal conspiracy.”

Attempts to reach Mike Davey, a lawyer for the police union, were not immediately successful.

But he told the Baltimore Sun that the union was confident that the suspended officers “had very little if any knowledge of any wrongdoing on behalf of Sergeant Gladstone.”

According to the indictment, Gladstone was at dinner with another officer on 26 March 2014, when he received a cellphone call from another police sergeant referred to as “WJ”.

The sergeant had just deliberately run over a suspect referred to in the indictment as “DS”, the court documents said.

In response, Gladstone retrieved a BB gun from the trunk of his police car and drove with the officer he had been having dinner with to the scene, prosecutors said.

Once there, Gladstone dropped the gun next to a pickup truck near where the suspect was lying injured on the ground, the indictment said.

Gladstone then told the sergeant, “WJ”, that the gun was near the truck and instructed the sergeant to have another officer search it, the indictment said. Gladstone then left the scene with the officer he came with, it added.

The sergeant referred to as W then told another officer to move the BB gun under the truck, closer to the victim, prosecutors said.

It was eventually recovered by the Baltimore Police Department’s crime lab unit and the suspect was subsequently charged with possession, use, and discharge of a gas or pellet gun – as well as a number of drug offences – based on a false statement of probable cause written by WJ in another officer’s name, the indictment said.

The suspect was detained on those charges for about a week; the charges were dismissed about eight months later.

According to the indictment unsealed this week, Gladstone – who retired about two months after the task force members were charged – told the officer with whom he had been having dinner that if the officer was questioned by federal law enforcement officials about the 2014 episode, the officer should lie and tell them that they had been deployed there to provide “scene security.”

This year, Baltimore’s mayor tapped Harrison to become the city’s fifth police chief in four years, and asked him to try to solve the many problems that chased most of the others from the job. Among the tasks was building trust among residents who widely view the department as racist, corrupt and indifferent.

In a statement about the indictment of Gladstone, he said the allegations “speak to a culture that I am here to change”.

The New York Times