Abuses by ex-Chicago cop Ronald Watts have ripped a hole in our city
Next month, seven years will have passed since the video of the police murder of Laquan McDonald was released, precipitating a cascade of events that transformed the civic life of Chicago. For the better part of a decade now, there has been a broad consensus that police reform is an urgent priority for the city. Yet hopes for a fundamental paradigm shift have not been realized. The reform process has proved bureaucratically opaque and now appears stalled. Increasingly polarized, public discourse churns but does not advance. Civic morale is fragile, as anxieties about crime threaten to eclipse concerns about police accountability.
Most important, the ultimate metric — the lived experience of those most directly affected by our form of apartheid justice — has not discernibly improved.
While not losing sight of the limited areas in which progress has been made, it’s important that we acknowledge the extent of the failure. This is not only a failure of leadership. While sharp criticism is certainly warranted, it’s not sufficient to blame the mayor, the police superintendent and the various oversight agencies. Nor are the inevitable catchphrases “code of silence” and “cover-up” adequate to take us to the heart of the matter. There is something deeper that must be confronted: We have proved incapable as a society, as a polity, of learning from experience and acting on what we have learned, making it inevitable that avoidable harms will recur in the future.
Among the most telling instances of this dynamic is the human rights disaster commonly referred to as the “Watts scandal.” Here are the basic facts:
For the better part of a decade, then-Chicago police Sgt. Ronald Watts and members of the gang tactical team under his command were an integral part of the drug trade in public housing developments — primarily the Ida B. Wells Homes — on the South Side. They have been accused of operating a protection racket, exacting a “tax” from drug dealers, as the buildings that constituted the developments were being demolished one by one as part of the city’s Plan for Transformation. Throughout most of this period, they were the subjects of open-ended investigations by the Chicago Police Department’s bureau of internal affairs and the FBI that dragged on and on.
In pursuit of their criminal ends, Watts and his team routinely planted evidence and fabricated drug and gun charges against those who did not cooperate with them, prosecutors have said. Since I first reported on their criminal activities in 2016, 183 people have been exonerated and some 220 convictions have been overturned. (Some exonerees had more than one conviction.)
Caught in an FBI sting in late 2011, Watts and his partner, Officer Kallatt Mohammed, were convicted on a single charge of stealing government property — the $5,200 used as bait in the sting — and were sentenced to 22 months and 18 months, respectively.
The criminal sentences served by Watts victims who have thus far been exonerated come to more than 450 years.
Despite these stunning facts, the Watts scandal is only partially and intermittently visible. Neither the scale of the suffering inflicted by these officers nor the downstream implications for the city have been recognized and acknowledged.
Imagine living your life and raising your children in a community where Watts and his team are the face of civil authority. Imagine they are free to prey on the community with impunity, while you and your neighbors have no means of redress and no sanctuary. Such conditions bear comparison to life under the most repressive, rapacious regimes. How has the city responded? Apart from the light sentences given Watts and Mohammed, not a single officer has been charged or disciplined. After the first group exoneration in 2017, CPD put 15 officers on desk duty pending investigation of their involvement in Watts’ criminal enterprise. Today, five are collecting their pensions after retiring, while the rest remain on the city payroll.
When Watts victims are exonerated, the filing of federal civil suits seeking damages on their behalf follows. If the city continues to practice its customary mode of scandal management, it will draw these cases out for as long as possible and then settle them at great cost to taxpayers but without public acknowledgment of the abuses or adoption of remedies to prevent similar abuses in the future.
Exonerations of individuals are, of course, to be welcomed, but findings of error or official misconduct in the individual case do not address the systemic conditions that led to the error or allowed the misconduct. A different sort of process is required, if we are to learn what can be learned from these events for the purpose of addressing the conditions that contributed to their occurrence.
That is the essence of truth and reconciliation processes: the moral imperative to reckon with the past in the interest of the future. The Watts scandal is a dramatic example of our consistent failure to do so.
Consider: High-rise public housing was the epitome of hypersegregation, and policing practices there were the purest form of apartheid policing. This extreme case illuminates the larger phenomenon and is therefore an invaluable resource for investigating the underlying pathologies of the prevailing modes of law enforcement. Yet it has scarcely figured at all in the discourse about “police reform.”
Nor is it part of the discourse about the Plan for Transformation and the fate of public housing. The “transformation” has been assessed solely in terms of community development metrics. Human rights violations by the police in the context of this social engineering project have not been confronted.
Remarkably, the crimes committed by Watts and Co. have received no attention from activists. The contrast with the vast amount of activism in response to the police murder of McDonald is striking.
The reality is that the Watts crew ravaged a vulnerable community, located at the center of the city, for years. Their crimes were enabled by policies, practices and institutional conditions that persist. In addition to CPD and the FBI, various other institutions and individuals knew or had the means to know what was going on — among them, the Chicago Housing Authority, private developers who assumed control of the developments in the course of the “transformation,” and prosecutors and judges — yet all had priorities other than ensuring the safety of residents.
This is something we did as a society to a particular community. Yet now that the scene of the crimes has been erased, it might as well never have happened. Demolition and forced relocation not only left expanses of vacant land in the central city, but they also left a void at the center of our civic discourse.
Moreover, there is a tendency to see the Watts abuses as a remote historical episode that took place in a bygone world. Deplorable, perhaps, but hardly a matter of immediate moral consequence. Such a view fails to comprehend how that history shapes the present
— for those who continue to suffer the downstream effects of their wrongful convictions and for the city as a whole.
At a time when the prevailing assumption is that the process of exonerating Watts victims has largely run its course, the immediacy of this human rights disaster and its claims on our attention are embodied, above all, by four men who have spent 19 years behind bars for two 2003 murders at the Harold Ickes public housing development. Former residents of the Prairie Courts public housing development, their names are Darnell and Donald Wilson, Raymond Youngblood, and Ahmad Poole. They credibly claim to have been framed by Watts. Over the course of their imprisonment, they mastered the relevant law and secured recantations from witnesses who testified against them at trial. Proceeding pro se, Darnell Wilson filed a post-conviction petition, granted by the state appellate court, in which he argued, among other things, that Watts bribed witnesses to testify against him and his co-defendants.
Now represented by the able, indefatigable attorneys of the Exoneration Project, who have handled most of the Watts exoneration cases, Wilson will soon have a hearing on his claim that he and the others — I have come to think of them as the Prairie Courts Four — are innocent.
Wilson’s post-conviction petition is the perfect emblem for this moment. It is hand-lettered. A jailhouse lawyer at Stateville Correctional Center meticulously drafted it for him by hand with pens purchased at the prison commissary.
We live in the age of “frozen scandal.” Coined by journalist Mark Danner to describe the way we have come to live with the knowledge of torture by the U.S. government in the post-9/11 era, the term has wide application.
This capacity to know and not know at the same time, yet somehow sleep at night, is the ultimate privilege. The victims enjoy no such privilege. They bear the burden of memory. Because every responsible institution has failed those preyed upon by the Watts team, they themselves are forcing a reckoning.
This extraordinary drama — in plain sight yet largely unseen — remains in suspense. Will we as a society rise to the challenge — the opportunity — presented to us by our neighbors and fellow citizens?