Kirkland cop stalked another officer for months—and he's still a supervisor

Caleb Gore narrowly avoided demotion after KPD found that he harassed an officer at her off-duty job, sent unwanted texts, and left a disturbing love note on her doorstep.

Kirkland Police Corporal Caleb Gore was suspended for 40 hours for stalking a female patrol officer after an internal investigation found he lurked at her off-duty job, joined her calls without being dispatched and left a love note on her doorstep. In her initial disciplinary memo, Kirkland Police Chief Cherie Harris demoted Gore because the department found evidence that he abused police data systems to find the officer’s home address. Still, she did not ultimately sustain these allegations.

Gore became friends with the officer via a small group of cops who would socialize after work, but he began to spiral after his divorce. According to investigation transcripts, Gore would make “quite dark” comments about his life going nowhere. In her interview, the woman said Gore drank “pretty heavily, to the point where he [threw] up on himself.”

A few months after they met, Gore confessed his feelings for her, but she insisted that their relationship remain strictly professional. Still, Gore fixated on her. She said he showed up to “dozens and dozens” of random calls when she hadn’t requested backup or a supervisor. He also went around her supervisor to revise her schedule and shifted work she was assigned to other officers,

Gore appeared at the skating rink where she worked off-duty and waited for her in the parking lot for nearly an hour after the rink had closed. He also texted her co-workers at the rink about her and asked about where she was.

At one point, Gore offered concert tickets to the woman for a show at the White River Amphitheatre but didn’t tell her that he would also be attending, surprising her and her friends. Another officer’s testimony explained how Gore routinely brought her up “out of the blue” even when the conversations had nothing to do with her.

She said he sent her drunken texts until she “slowly stepped away.” When she stopped responding to his texts, she said the “messages would just get longer.”

She was most disturbed by a handwritten note delivered to her home address because she had never told him where. She was terrified that her children could have found the note and asked her supervisor if Gore had ever driven or waited around her house.

KPD retained a lawyer, Kathleen Haggard, to investigate the case. After her investigation, she found evidence that Gore was harassing the unnamed employee and acting unethically. A search of logs from ACCESS, the statewide police data system, found that he had run the woman’s license plate a few months before he delivered the note.

Gore told Haggard that the woman had given him her address. He explained in a memo that he could have run the officer’s plate during “normal patrol operations.” Gore elaborated that he may have run her license due to her driving or because officers routinely run the plates of cars they don’t recognize near the department. He said it was plausible that he didn’t recognize her car because she drove a Tesla Model Y, which are “amongst [sic] one of the most common cars in the City of Kirkland.”

In the final disciplinary memo, Chief Harris wrote that it “seems unlikely” Gore ran the officer’s license plate by chance without recognizing it. Nevertheless, the chief accepted Gore’s reasoning and suspended him for 40 hours instead of the planned demotion. However, she noted that she still has concerns about his “credibility” and “fitness to serve as a supervisor.

In 2023, Caleb Gore made $155,232. He’s nearly in the top 10 percent of Kirkland’s highest-paid municipal employees.