Chicago approves $90M payout over disgraced ex-sergeant who framed hundreds for drug crimes

CHICAGO (AP) — The Chicago City Council on Thursday unanimously approved a $90 million settlement for nearly 200 civil rights violations involving a notorious former police sergeant who framed people for drug crimes they didn’t commit in one of the biggest police misconduct scandals in the city’s history.

The groundbreaking deal closes out 176 lawsuits involving 180 wrongfully convicted people who spent close to 200 years combined behind bars, marking an end to one of the Chicago Police Department’s darkest chapters.

Disgraced former police Sgt. Ronald Watts and the unit he led for nearly a decade until 2012 was accused of planting drugs on suspects, falsifying police reports and falsely accusing housing project residents and others of drug crimes unless they paid the officers off.

“Watts and his team of officers terrorized the Black community in the Ida B. Wells housing project for over a decade,” Theresa Kleinhaus, an attorney representing the individuals involved in the settlement, said in a statement to The Associated Press. “This settlement gives our clients some measure of justice for what they went through.”

Watts resigned from the police department and pleaded guilty in 2012 to stealing from a federal informant posing as a homeless man and drug dealer as part of an undercover FBI sting. He was sentenced to 22 months in prison in 2021.

In the years after, dozens of residents of the Ida B. Wells Homes on Chicago’s South Side began coming forward with claims they had been wrongly arrested by the police unit Watts led.

“This closes a nasty and ugly chapter that many young men on the South Side endured,” Ald. Jason Ervin said ahead of the City Council vote Thursday.

Ahmed Kosoko, Watts’s attorney, said he had no comment on the settlement but claimed that Watts “neither arrested, accused, nor testified against the plaintiffs.”

“His involvement, where it existed at all, was limited to administrative tasks typical of a field sergeant — conducted after the fact and entirely unrelated to the legality or substance of the underlying arrests,” Kosoko said in a statement to the AP. “In many instances, he was not even on duty when the incidents occurred.”

At a City Council finance committee meeting earlier this month, the city’s attorneys said the cases had already cost Chicago millions of dollars and would likely cost hundreds of millions more if a settlement was not reached. Many of the committee’s members expressed relief that it wouldn’t cost the city more to resolve the federal civil rights cases.

Chicago taxpayers have long been asked to pay out multimillion-dollar police misconduct lawsuits, fueling a bedrock of mistrust between the city’s residents and its police department.

The deal also comes as Chicago faces a budget shortfall of over $1 billion for 2026, according to the Chicago Financial Future Task Force, which was convened by Mayor Brandon Johnson. The transit system and school district for country’s third-largest city are especially facing budget problems.

Ald. Nicholas Sposato praised the settlement as “the deal of a century” during Thursday’s meeting.