BALTIMORE - The officers' job during some of the bloodiest years in Baltimore was to get guns off the streets.
Instead, they plundered money, jewelry, drugs and weapons and gouged the cash-strapped city for overtime and hours they never worked, according to their own admissions and testimony in ongoing criminal cases.
Over the past four years, some members of the Gun Trace Task Force stole more than $300,000, at least three kilos of cocaine, 43 pounds of marijuana, 800 grams of heroin and hundreds of thousands of dollars in watches from suspected drug dealers and civilians, according to officers' plea agreements and statements in federal court.
They admit to putting illegal trackers on the cars of suspected dealers so they could rob their homes and sell off any drugs and guns they found. The squad sergeant, Wayne Jenkins, carried brass knuckles, a machete and a grappling hook - all shown to jurors - in case they found a "monster" dealer to swindle, two officers testified in Baltimore over the past week. Those officers testified that Jenkins also told them to carry BB guns to plant at crime scenes in case they needed to justify why they had hurt someone.
As they went rogue, the same officers took home hundreds of thousands of dollars in unearned overtime pay from a city struggling to pay its teachers.
