The officers, all with the Baltimore Police Department, were members of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), which was created in 2007 to stem the flow of illegal weapons into Baltimore. Initially, the task force focused on gun trafficking. Its members used the serial numbers of seized weapons in an attempt to find the suppliers of guns that helped fuel the city’s high rates of violent crimes.

According to reporting in the Baltimore Sun, that mission changed in 2013, after a consultant said the task force was being underutilized. Instead of going after dealers, the consultant said, the task force needed to be operating at the street level, taking guns directly from the people who carried them. 

In 2015, the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody touched off rioting and a sharp increase in the city’s homicide rate; some police said they were reluctant to make routine arrests. The surge gave greater urgency for the police to find illegal weapons. Daniel Hersl, one of the officers convicted of misconduct, would later say: “While the majority of the police force took a laid back approach after Freddie Gray, the squads I was associated with took the risk, faced the danger and got the guns and drugs off the street.”

During this time, the U.S. Department of Justice investigated the city’s police department and concluded in 2016 that officers were “using enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches and arrests of African Americans.” Further litigation led to a 2017 consent decree between the federal government and the City of Baltimore over the hiring, training and deployment of its police force.

Misconduct by the GTTF officers began as early as 2009, but the events that led to the officers’ arrests started in 2015. At the time, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration was working a case involving cocaine and heroin trafficking in Northeast Baltimore. 

During their surveillance, DEA agents intercepted a call from Detective Momodu Gondo alerting the dealers. Gondo is also said to have helped one of the alleged dealers remove a GPS tracking device from his vehicle.

Federal agents, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, began an investigation into Gondo, which expanded to other members of the task force. The agents planted recording devices in Baltimore Police cars to keep tabs on the officers.

On February 23, 2017, prosecutors filed an indictment against Gondo and six other officers in U.S. District Court for Maryland. The other officers were Evodio Hendrix, Hersl, Wayne Jenkins, Jemell Rayam, Marcus Taylor and Maurice Ward. An eighth officer, Thomas Allers, was indicted on August 24, 2017.

According to the indictments against the seven officers, which reference events in 2015 and 2016, the officers engaged in a racketeering conspiracy that “included violating the legitimate purposes of the Baltimore Police Department to enrich themselves through illegal conduct including extortion, robbery and time and attendance fraud.”

The indictment against Gondo and the six officers said that they had: detained individuals and stolen money and drugs from them; illegally entered residences and stolen money, property and drugs from these places; conducted traffic stops and stolen from the occupants of the vehicles; sworn out false affidavits to obtain search warrants; prepared false incident and arrest reports; evaded court proceedings involving their victims to avoid questioning; tipped each other off about potential investigations into their wrongdoing; turned off body cameras to avoid recording some incidents; and defrauded the public by submitting fraudulent time and attendance records to obtain unearned salary and overtime pay.

In some instances, according to the indictment, the officers had nearly doubled their salaries by fraudulently filing for overtime. The specific misconduct alleged in the indictments is not directly connected to any wrongful convictions. Many of the offenses involved robbing suspected drug dealers and then filing false reports or no reports on these incidents to conceal the stolen items, which included drugs and money.

In some instances, no charges were filed against the defendants; in others, the charges were dismissed. There is no evidence that prosecutors knew about the extent of the officers’ misconduct prior to the indictments, but there is some evidence that the edges of their tactics were on display.

In 2015, for example, a judge suppressed evidence seized in a search warrant after finding that Rayam was either “intentionally or recklessly false” in his observations.  A prosecutor would write in January 2016 that this incident would need to be disclosed.

The earliest misconduct, according to later indictments, occurred in 2009, when several officers searched a house in Baltimore. They didn’t find any drugs, but used a key fob to locate a truck on the street. The officers searched the truck and found more than 40 kilograms (about 90 pounds) of cocaine. The officers took three kilograms to sell and reported the rest. The owner of the truck was charged and convicted. Later, due to the misconduct of the officers, he had his sentence reduced.

In another incident, from 2010, undercover officers wearing masks swarmed a car driven by Umar Burley. Fearing he was about to be robbed, Burley sped off. His car crashed and he killed an elderly man. The officers then planted heroin in his car. Burley and his passenger, Brent Matthews, were convicted of possession, and Burley was separately convicted of manslaughter. Their convictions were vacated in 2017 and 2018.

These high-profile incidents of misconduct notwithstanding, the corruption that led to the exonerations of more than 800 defendants involved the routine police activities of the task force, as the officers patrolled Baltimore neighborhoods searching for illegal weapons and contraband. Ward would later testify that a preferred tactic of the task force was to pull up quickly on groups of men on the street and then see who ran. That gave the officers a pretext to follow, detain, and search the individuals.

When the searches didn’t turn up a weapon, the officers sometimes planted one of their own.

Ivan Potts said he was walking down the street on September 2, 2015 when several officers jumped out of an unmarked car, stopped him, and then demanded that he consent to a search. When Potts didn’t comply with the request, the officers then slammed him to the ground, and began kicking and beating him while he lay there helpless. Officers handcuffed and then searched him; Potts said they found no drugs nor weapons. But he said one of the officers produced a gun, and they forced Potts to hold the weapon to get his fingerprints on it. Because of previous convictions, Potts was charged with six counts related to being a felon in possession of a weapon. At trial, six of the officers testified falsely against him, and Potts was convicted of three counts on March 2, 2016 and sentenced to eight years in prison. His conviction was vacated on April 12, 2017, and charges dismissed on May 16, 2017.

Police arrested Blanton Roberts in a similar manner. He said several members of the task force came up on his porch while on patrol on October 7, 2015. One of the officers said that Roberts had tugged on his waistband, suggesting the presence of a weapon. The officers said in their report that Roberts tossed a weapon off the porch, which they later found during a search. Roberts said the officers planted the weapon to justify his arrest. Police charged Roberts with illegal possession of a weapon and several related counts. Roberts had previous felony convictions and pled guilty on July 12, 2016. After the officers were arrested, Roberts’s charges were dismissed on July 5, 2017.

In a federal lawsuit against the city of Baltimore and other parties, Roberts claims that prosecutors committed misconduct by hiding disciplinary problems of task force members through legal maneuvers that shielded their misdeeds from disclosure.

Nearly all of the defendants, including Roberts and Potts, were African-American men. Many had arrest records, and most pled guilty rather than fight the charges at trial.

Among the defendants arrested by Hersl was Kevron Evans, a rapper known as "Young Moose."  He pled guilty to drug possession in 2012 and was placed on probation. After his conviction was vacated in 2020, Evans filed a lawsuit against Hersl and the city, claiming that officers planted cocaine in the trunk of his car. He received a settlement of $300,000 on June 1, 2022.

Six of the initial eight officers charged in the federal indictments pled guilty in 2017 to charges including racketeering, theft, and submitting falsified pay records. The shortest sentences, for two of the officers, were seven years in prison. The longest, for Jenkins, a sergeant and the group’s leader, was for 25 years. Rayam received 12 years. Hersl received 18 years. As the investigation continued, federal prosecutors charged an additional six police officers and a bail bondsman with crimes related to the misconduct in Baltimore, bringing the total to 15. One of the officers, Eric Snell, had left the Baltimore Police Department and was working for the Philadelphia Police Department. He pled guilty to drug distribution charges. Prosecutors said he was selling the drugs illegally confiscated by the Baltimore officers.

In addition, former Baltimore Police Commissioner Darryl DeSousa pled guilty in 2019 to three charges of tax fraud, including falsely claiming deductions that didn’t exist, and was sentenced to 10 months in prison. In a sentencing memorandum, federal prosecutors tied DeSousa’s misconduct to the members of the Gun Trace Task Force. They wrote: “The IRS and FBI learned in the course of their investigation in this case and in the investigation of the BPD’s Gun Trace Task Force that other BPD officers engaged in similar conduct … That is not a coincidence. It is our understanding that the practice of taking these fraudulent deductions was information that was shared among officers at BPD.”

Separately, Detective Sean Suiter was found shot to death in a parking lot on November 15, 2017. He was scheduled to testify the next day before a federal grand jury about the Gun Trace Task Force and was considered a subject of the investigation. An independent review of his death ruled it was most likely a suicide.

The office of Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore City, said that nearly 800 defendants had their convictions vacated based on the misconduct. A complete list of the defendants, their convictions, sentences and the dates of their vacations is not available.

Initially, Mosby’s efforts to vacate convictions were hampered by state law that limited the reasons her office could request that a judge vacate a conviction. But Maryland’s legislature passed a law in 2019 that allowed prosecutors to request vacations in cases where “the interest of justice and fairness justifies vacating the probation before judgment or conviction."

A blue-ribbon commission created in 2018 to examine the failings of the Gun Trace Task Force and make recommendations gave a sober assessment of the situation in its report, issued in late 2020. It said: 

The Commission routinely heard BPD officials express the sentiment that integrity is the
backbone of effective policing. However, little evidence exists to demonstrate that this sentiment
was a true priority of the BPD; it was not reflected in internal affairs staffing or proactive measures
to discover and deter misconduct. In fact, no commander beyond Commissioner Bealefield truly
took responsibility for the failure to supervise effectively the GTTF instead police personnel
pointed up or down the chain of command as the source of failure.

The commission recommended increased accountability measures - including integrity tests and drugs tests - and enhanced ethics training, as well as an overhaul of the review boards that examine police conduct.

Several defendants, including Potts, filed claims for compensation against the Baltimore Police Department. Initially, there was a legal question about whether the city of Baltimore could be held responsible for misconduct, such as theft, that was clearly outside the legal scope of an officer’s employment.

In April 2020, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that in cases where officers made arrests for weapons and drug possession but didn’t do anything to further their own personal interests, the misconduct was within their scope of employment. Potts was the plaintiff in that case, winning $32,000. The ruling was expected to lead to more litigation and potentially significant settlement expenses for the city of Baltimore. In November 2020, the city paid $8 million to settle lawsuits filed by Burley and Matthews.  Potts received an additional $400,000. In July 2021, the city paid $525,000 to Robert Johnson, who was convicted of gun possession in 2014. Darnell Evans, who was convicted of gun possession in 2015, settled his lawsuit in 2022, receiving $575,000

Other wrongfully convicted defendants received settlements between $125,000 and $400,000. As of June 2023, according to figures from the city’s Board of Estimates and published reports, the cost of the settlements is approximately $23 million, including $6 million to the family of the man killed in the car accident involving Burley and Matthews.

On January 13, 2022, the Steptoe & Johnson law firm released a report↗ on its investigation into the Gun Trace Task Force scandal. The investigation had been  been ordered in 2019 by U.S. District Court Judge James Brader, who oversaw the 2017 consent decree. 

The executive summary of the report said: 

We began this investigation trying to answer this question: how did the GTTF come to be comprised of corrupt officers willing and able to commit crimes against the people of Baltimore? The answer is complicated. The new, more aggressive enforcement strategies adopted at the beginning of the 21st century were layered on top of a culture that had a permissive attitude towards the excessive use of force and in a department that included pockets of officers engaged in misconduct and corruption. Officers willing to engage in misconduct gravitated to each other.

The report further said: "Many of [the GTTF] members were engaging in misconduct and corruption. Because their victims were often involved in criminal conduct themselves, they were reluctant to file complaints against the officers. And because the infrequent complaints that were filed pitted the victims’ word against the word of one or more officers, the complaints were seldom sustained: complainants with a criminal record did not have much of a chance. The lesson taught to officers and complainants alike was that the officers could engage in corruption and misconduct with no consequences."

- Ken Otterbourg

Known members of this group

Umar Burley, Brent Matthews,  Darnell Earl, Kevron Evans, Kendrick Johnson, Robert Johnson, Donte Pauling, Blanton Roberts, Shawn Whiting, Dawud Morris, Paul Jones, Devon Harrod, Ivan Potts, Sherman Thomas, Paul Jones, Garfield Redd, Kyle Knox, Shaune Berry, Ricardo Shaw, Stanley Bass, and Keyon Paylor.