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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/us/keith-gladstone-baltimore-police.html
Baltimore Sergeant Planted BB Gun on Man Run Over by Police, Indictment Says
A former Baltimore police sergeant has been indicted on civil rights, conspiracy and witness tampering charges after prosecutors said he planted a BB gun at the scene of a 2014 arrest where a fellow sergeant was panicking after having deliberately run over a suspect.
The indictment also led the troubled Baltimore Police Department to suspend three current officers pending an internal investigation, and a fourth officer listed in the indictment who had already been suspended will be investigated as well, the department’s acting commissioner, Michael Harrison, said Wednesday.
Commissioner Harrison called the allegations against Mr. Gladstone and the other officers “beyond disturbing.”
The indictment and suspensions are the latest scandal to shake the city’s Police Department, which has reeled in recent years from the death of Freddie Gray, a scathing Justice Department investigation and one of the nation’s highest murder rates. 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 indicted on racketeering charges in 2017 in a high-profile case.
The sergeant accused of planting the BB gun, Keith A. Gladstone, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment on Tuesday to all three counts of the indictment shortly after it was unsealed, his lawyer said Wednesday. Mr. Gladstone, 51, was released on his own recognizance, the lawyer said.
In the indictment, which was announced by the United States attorney’s office for the District of Maryland, prosecutors said Mr. Gladstone also told an officer to lie about the 2014 episode if questioned by federal investigators. Several officers were involved or witnessed the events, according to the indictment.
The lawyer for Mr. Gladstone, David B. Irwin, said he was still reviewing the indictment and had no immediate comment. If convicted, Mr. 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 offenses against the United States; 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 honorable officers whose reputations they unfairly tarnish,” Robert K. Hur, the United States 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 Sgt. Gladstone.”
According to the indictment, Mr. Gladstone was at dinner with another officer on March 26, 2014, when he received a cellphone call from another police sergeant referred to as “W.J.” The sergeant had just deliberately run over a suspect referred to in the indictment as “D.S.,” the court documents said.
In response, Mr. 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, Mr. Gladstone dropped the gun next to a pickup truck near where the suspect was lying injured on the ground, the indictment said. Mr. Gladstone then told the sergeant, “W.J.,” that the gun was near the truck and instructed the sergeant to have another officer search it, the indictment said. Mr. Gladstone then left the scene with the officer he came with, it added.
The sergeant referred to as W.J. 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 offenses — based on a false statement of probable cause written by W.J. 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, Mr. 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 Commissioner 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 Mr. Gladstone, he said the allegations “speak to a culture that I am here to change.”
