Ronald Watts
Picture: E4466F6F-8558-453F-A444-4984212E43D8
Additional Picture 1: AD42E1DA-AD19-4DC9-9985-A87BB202A9CB
a.k.a.
Sgt. Ronald WattsD.O.B./Age:
1979Location:
South Side ChicagoSnitch Biography:
There where 14 men with drug convictions related to Sgt. Ronald Watts cases were exonerated — four of them on Wednesday and 10 on Monday. With those exonerations, 63 men and women have had their cases vacated because of the involvement of Sgt. Ronald Watts and Officer Kallatt Mohammed, lawyers for the 14 men said.
Evidence shows the two officers took the money, and then paid the informant $400 “for allowing them to steal the drug proceeds” in 2011, the statement said. “Who always takes care of you?” Sergeant Watts told the informant, according to the statement.
A woman from Wells Homes, a housing project on the South Side of Chicago Clarissa Glenn set out to prove that a Chicago police officer framed her husband. Now the city is reckoning with years of wrongful arrests.
Clarissa and her husband left their apartment in the Ida B. Wells Homes, a housing project on the South Side of Chicago, to meet her partner, Ben Baker, outside the building. They found him talking with a police sergeant named Ronald Watts, a notorious figure in the project. Watts oversaw a team of police officers who were supposed to be rooting out the project’s drug trade, but he was in fact running his own “criminal enterprise,” as another officer later put it.
Watts extorted money from drug dealers and other residents, and when they didn’t pay him he fabricated drug charges against them.
That morning, Ben said, the sergeant had tried to shake him down. Ben told him, “Man, f**k you. Do your motherf***ing job,” before walking away.
On a Sunday in December, Ben was at home, planning to watch the Bears play the Steelers, when Clarissa called, asking him to pick her up at her aunt’s house. Returning home, as they drove into the parking lot next to the Wells, Watts and one of his officers pulled up behind them. They demanded Ben’s keys, and started searching the car. Finally, Watts reached inside the driver’s-side door and shouted,
“I got it!”
Clarissa said she saw Watts take something out of his sleeve, and she and Ben both recalled what Watts said next: “Put the cuffs on him—and you can lock her ass up, too.”
Ben and Clarissa were charged with drug possession with intent to sell.
Clarissa had never been arrested before, and set out to prove that she and Ben had been framed.
That turned out to be far more difficult than she had expected.
Ben was convicted and imprisoned, while Clarissa reluctantly pleaded guilty in exchange for a probation sentence.
During the next ten years, she struggled to raise their sons alone, suffered from depression, and at times was unemployed. But she kept at it, and her and Ben’s efforts started a chain of events that, last fall, led the state’s attorney’s office to dismiss the convictions of fifteen men who had been arrested by Watts’s team.
The director of the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit told reporters, “The police were not being truthful,” and “in good conscience we could not see these convictions stand.”
Physical Description:
Ethnicity/Race: African AmericanHeight: 5.10
Weight: 220
Tattoos:no
Clothing Style: Bum
Sexual Orientation: Straight