A City Council committee tried Monday to write a $90 million ending to one of the ugliest chapters in the Chicago Police Department’s checkered history of disgraced cops.
A Finance Committee that has closely scrutinized and occasionally stalled prior settlements tied to allegations of police wrongdoing unanimously jumped at the chance to resolve 176 lawsuits tied to former Chicago police Sgt. Ronald Watts in one fell swoop.
That’s because the cost of the proposed, precedent-setting settlement would be a fraction of the $500 million that Corporation Counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry has said it could have cost to resolve those cases individually.
Mayor Brandon Johnson is already struggling to close a $1.15 billion shortfall after ending 2024 with $146 million in red ink, the second straight year of deficit spending.
Alderpersons have been told the Johnson administration plans to use a line of credit retired by “general funds,” and that the mayor’s finance team has “various options” to retire that debt. The full Council is expected to take up the proposed Watts “global settlement” at its Sept. 25 meeting.
“I don’t know how they pulled this off,” Ald. Nick Sposato (38th), one of the police union’s staunchest City Council supporters, said shortly before Monday’s vote, adding, “We have to cut our losses.”
Sposato noted that scores of cases tied to two other notoriously corrupt cops — former Area 2 Cmdr. Jon Burge and former Detective Reynaldo Guevara — are still pending.
“I imagine they’re trying to do the same with those cases,” Sposato said of the global settlement that will pay Watts’ victims anywhere from $150,000 to more than $3 million for a man who spent a decade in prison on a Watts case.
Downtown Ald. Bill Conway (34th) argued that Watts and his underling, former Officer Kallatt Mohammed, have already been convicted of extortion, leaving the city without a legal leg to stand on and saddled with a massive “liability overhang.”
Being able to “right the wrongs of the past while doing what’s fiscally best for Chicago going forward” is a “great win” for taxpayers because it “gets a known liability off our books,” said Conway, a former Cook County prosecutor who closely scrutinizes police settlements. “Even if we have to borrow money, this is something that is worth doing for the fiscal health of the city.”
“I’m so confident that this is a financial win for the city that however we have to pay for it is worth it,” Conway continued. “And it’s not like liability was in question here. You had two sergeants who have already been convicted. All of the defendants have certificates of innocence.”
Budget Chair Jason Ervin (28th) said he was “hopeful this strategy can be used in other cases” where “legal bills continue to run.”
“I wish we had had this during the Burge time,” Ervin said before Monday’s vote. “It probably would have saved us a ton of money.”
Watts was accused of framing hundreds of people on drug charges from 2003 to 2008 while he ran a tactical unit in the now-demolished Ida B. Wells public housing complex on the South Side. Former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx tossed out more than 200 drug convictions involving Watts.
Allegations that Watts and his team were extorting money from drug dealers — and falsely arresting people who would not cooperate — led to investigations spanning more than eight years, according to a report by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, a city agency that investigates officer misconduct.
The case broke in November 2011 when Watts and Mohammed stole $5,200 from a homeless person who had convinced Watts he would be transporting cash for drug traffickers that day.
The drug courier was actually a federal informant. Watts and Mohammed were arrested in February 2012. They later pleaded guilty to corruption charges and served sentences of 22 and 18 months, respectively.
Cook County judges have vacated at least 234 Watts-tied felony convictions since 2016. Nearly all of the 190 exonerees sued for damages in federal court. The city has already settled with at least nine of them for $11.8 million, according to Law Department records.
The Watts global settlement would conclude 64% of reversed-conviction lawsuits against the city. Before the committee’s vote, Richardson-Lowry vowed to “take what we’ve learned” from the settlement and use it to resolve other massive liability cases.
“I’d love to say this is the end of the journey. It is not,” Richardson-Lowry said. “There will be a next chapter. Sadly, we have other scenarios we have to solve for.”