The city of Chicago on Thursday announced a first-of-its-kind $90 million “global settlement” to resolve 176 lawsuits tied to disgraced former Chicago police Sgt. Ronald Watts, who ran a corrupt public housing unit and went to federal prison for shaking down an FBI informant.
The proposed payouts, which require City Council approval, would range from $150,000 to more than $3 million for a man who spent a decade in prison on a Watts case.
The plaintiffs have collectively spent more than 180 years in custody and have long maintained they were wrongfully convicted based on bogus evidence. All their convictions have been vacated, and many of the plaintiffs have been granted certificates of innocence.
The city — which doesn’t apologize or admit wrongdoing as part of the deal — has already spent some $36 million on other Watts settlements, according to the city’s Law Department. That includes at least $11.8 million to plaintiffs, city records show. The rest went to their attorneys.
Taking the remaining cases to court would drag on for years and eventually cost the city up to $500 million, Mary B. Richardson-Lowry, the city’s corporation counsel, said at a Loop news conference.
The mass settlement would conclude 64% of reversed-conviction lawsuits against the city, said Richardson-Lowry, who was appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson.
“It’s an all-or-nothing. It’s global, and I recognize it’s unusual. But these are unusual circumstances,” Richardson-Lowry told reporters. “If we were to take it case by case, the cost would go up, the liability would go up, the time end would go up, it would unfold over many years — as it has — and I’m simply not willing to pursue it in that manner.
“We had two officers who were investigated by the FBI, pled guilty to a host of issues, and adversely impacted the lives of many,” she added. “We have an opportunity to solve for a host of those problems, and we’re going to do that.”
City of Chicago Corporation Counsel Mary B. Richardson-Lowry (left) speaks beside Deputy Corporation Counsel Victoria Benson during a news conference Thursday where she discussed a global settlement amounting to $90 million for 176 police misconduct lawsuits involving former Chicago Police Department Sgt. Ronald Watts and his tactical team members.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
Joel Flaxman, an attorney for about a third of the plaintiffs, declined to comment until the full City Council approves the settlement. An attorney for the rest couldn’t immediately be reached.
The $90 million resembles a 2023 WBEZ estimate of what the cases would cost the city to settle. The estimate stemmed from a review of 17 reversed convictions that led to city payouts in 2021 and 2022. Those payouts averaged $302,366 for every year a plaintiff spent in jail or prison.
In a statement, Johnson called it “a historic moment that reflects our commitment to accountability and healing.”
It’s unclear how the city would afford the settlement as it stares down a $146 million budget hole for 2025 and a whopping $1.15 billion gap for next year — with no new revenue or clear solutions on the horizon.
The $90 million payout would on its own blow out the city’s entire budget for all settlements in 2025. By May, the city had already burned through the $82.6 million earmarked for settlements before agreeing to pay $23.4 million more in settlements in June.
City Council members have been briefed on the proposal. The Finance Committee is expected to vote on the settlement at its Monday meeting. If it passes, the full Council would take it up at its Sept. 25 meeting.
Skeptical City Council?
Police settlements have historically sparked bitter debate between the Council’s more conservative alderpersons and progressives — with conservative Council members united against the payouts.
But some of the Council’s staunchest opponents of police settlements said Thursday they will support the Watts settlement, saying it would put to rest a chapter in Chicago’s history of police misconduct.
Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd), chair of the Public Safety Committee, said he will support the settlement but doesn’t expect an unanimous vote because some colleagues “might think the cost is too high.” Hopkins understands that perspective but said the Law Department reached “the best possible price tag” for the past wrongdoing.
“Here we are once again, voting on major payouts and settlements for things that happened years ago,” he said. “The more you have to vote on these, the harder it gets. We’re just tired of seeing this. You want to put an end to it, and I think we have actually. Jon Burge could never exist, Ronald Watts could never exist in the police department of today.”
Ald. Raymond Lopez (15th), who regularly votes against police misconduct settlements, said he supports the deal.
“I believe this, albeit an extraordinary amount of money, is the best option for taxpayers in order to move beyond this chapter in our history,” he said. “Me and many of my colleagues have asked about a mass settlement. This would be the fruition of our advocacy.”
Ald. Nick Sposato (38th) said he will begrudgingly support the deal and thinks it has the juice to pass.
“Unfortunately I do [support it],” Sposato said. “I mean most of these people are guilty, but we’re just cutting our losses. It kills me to give them the money but I think it was a good negotiation.”
‘Horrible time’
Richardson-Lowry said she expects the Council to approve the settlement.
“Some of them may not be old enough to know who Ronald Watts was and what he represented. They will,” she said. “For those who are more seasoned, they had to live through it. It was a horrible time for the city.”
Allegations that Watts and his team were extorting money from drug dealers in the former Ida B. Wells public housing complex — 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.
Those probes involved federal agencies including the FBI, the U.S. attorney’s office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as well as local entities including CPD and the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.
Watts and an officer he supervised, Kallatt Mohammed, in November 2011 stole $5,200 from a homeless person who had convinced Watts he would be transporting cash for drug traffickers that day.
But 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.
Hundreds of cases wiped out
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, according to Law Department records.
The first exoneree was Ida B. Wells resident Ben Baker, who languished in prison for nearly a decade before a Cook County judge — in light of the Watts and Mohammed arrests — threw out two of Baker’s Watts-tied drug convictions in 2016.
The City Council in January approved a $7.5 million settlement with Baker and his longtime companion, Clarissa Glenn, who was also arrested by Watts’s unit.
Apart from Wells residents, the Watts scandal has led to other litigation. The City Council in 2016 approved a $2 million settlement in a police whistleblower lawsuit that would have required then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel to take the stand had it gone to trial.
The plaintiffs, police officers Shannon Spalding and Daniel Echeverria, were working in the narcotics unit in 2007 when they learned Watts was shaking down drug dealers. The pair contended their supervisors retaliated against them for helping the FBI build a case against Watts.
In 2022, police Sgt. Alvin Jones left the force when COPA released its long-delayed report focused on allegations he engaged in extortion as part of the Watts crew. The report named a former police informant who, according to the agency, described Jones as Watts’ “bodyguard and enforcer, a man who was known to beat people in order to get information.”
Watts, in rare public comments since his prison release, told a conservative web streamer in 2023 he had been wrongly targeted by investigators, prosecutors, journalists, liberal universities and people whose convictions had been thrown out.
“These guys took over buildings where kids couldn’t go to school in the morning because of narcotic sales,” Watts said. “That led me to be as aggressive as I was and to be down there in their face.”