The Housing Project Plagued by Police Corruption

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I think when you're going through life

knowing every time you walk out

of your apartment building that

you might be able to be arrested

for something that you did not do.

It's so profoundly un-American

that you could be arrested for anything

at any time, that a cop could put drugs on you,

could then get on the witness stand in a courthouse

and say that you were guilty when you were not.

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You know, last fall, last November

15 men in Chicago came to the courthouse

and were exonerated altogether.

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They are men who all served time

for crimes they say the didn't commit.

Now the county's top prosecutor agrees with them.

Because of crooked police investigations.

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It was believed to be the first

mass exoneration in Cook County history.

[Interviewer] Let's talk about

some of the main characters in the story,

starting with Ronald Watts.

Who is he and what kind of a person is he?

Ronald Watts was a sergeant

in the Chicago Police Department.

Their job was to root out the drug trafficking

and the drug dealing going on

in the Ida B. Wells Homes.

What they were actually doing,

in fact, what he was actually doing

is running his own sort of criminal enterprise.

Shaking down drug dealers,

shaking down other residents of the projects

and demanding money from them, bribes.

He was planting drugs, heroin, cocaine,

on residents and hauling them to the precinct

and then off to jail.

When I would ask some of the men

who had been arrested by him

how they would describe him,

some of them would talk about Training Day,

about the corrupt detective.

All right, I'm puttin' cases on all you bitches!

Huh?

You think you can do this shit?

I'm the police!

I run shit here!

You just live here!

The story takes place primarily

in a housing project on the south side of Chicago

that no longer exists, but it was called

the Ida B. Wells Homes.

And it was opened in 1941,

it was the first housing project in Chicago

that was built specifically for African-Americans,

it was segregated housing.

And at the time it was a place

of tremendous promise.

It really embodied the aspirations

of the entire neighborhood.

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And then over the decades,

the Chicago Housing Authority

neglected their buildings.

The place became incredibly run down.

You have graffiti, you have gunshots,

you have, you know, open-air drug dealing.

So it's a very, very challenging place to grow up.

You know, I think of all the folks

that were affected by this corruption.

It seemed to me that Ben and Clarissa Baker

paid the very highest price.

Ben and Clarissa are couple who

met in 1990 in night school on the south side of Chicago.

He grew up in the Ida B. Wells Homes

and she grew up about a half a mile away.

She came from a middle class family.

Her father was a private detective.

And they became a couple and they had three boys.

And she ultimately moves into the Ida B. Wells.

They really trace their troubles

with Sergeant Watts back to 2004.

The sergeant asking him for money and he refused.

Ultimately at the end of 2005,

they're driving down the street together

into the Ida B. Wells, into the parking lot

by their building, and a police officer

comes up behind them and another beside them.

And here is Sergeant Watts and one of his officers

demanding their keys,

demanding that they get out of the car

and searching the whole car.

They see Sergeant Watts put his hand

inside the door and as they remember,

he pulls out his hand and he says, I got it.

Clarissa tells me that she saw something

come out of his sleeve.

And fast-forward several months,

Ben now has two pending drug cases.

He goes on trial in Chicago and ultimately

is convicted despite testifying in his own defense,

despite his lawyer telling the whole story about the bribes

and the corruption going on in Ida B. Wells.

And he's sentenced ultimately to 14 years in prison.

And it rips the family apart.

From what Clarissa has told me

it sounds like it was so deeply traumatic, what happened.

And here she is a single mom

with three kids to raise by herself.

Because she had been convicted in this case with Ben,

she's now a convicted felon.

Which of course means it's much harder

to find decent paying job.

You can't get Section 8 which is a federal rental subsidy.

So life just becomes infinitely harder.

[Interviewer] How was Officer Watts finally exposed?

In 2012, when Ben Baker was in prison

and had been in prison for some six years,

one night he's on the cell block, it's nighttime,

folks are getting ready to go to sleep

and somebody telling him,

Turn the TV on, turn the TV on!

He turns it on and there is Sergeant Watts

sprinting down the street

on the news with one of his officers.

As it turns out, Sergeant Watts has been arrested.

This is in early 2012.

He and one of his officers were arrested

for what was called theft of government funds.

So even after Sergeant Watts went to prison,

he was sentenced to 22 months,

Ben Baker was still in prison.

You know, in 2015 at the same time

that there was a lawyer Joshua Tepfer

at the Exoneration Project in Chicago

putting together a petition

trying to get Ben Baker out of prison,

folks were protesting in the streets

the murder of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer.

The videotape had never been released

so it was only through the efforts

of folks in Chicago pushing very hard

to get a judge to order the release

of that tape that it was out.

And once folks saw the way this teenager

had died at the hands of a police shooting,

they took to the streets.

16 shots! 16 shots!

And that rage and frustration

really changed the tone, I think,

of the conversation around criminal justice

and helped bring in a new state's attorney.

Woman named Kim Fox who ultimately

is the person who made the decision

about the mass exoneration.

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You know, we've been talking in the media

for many years now about wrongful convictions

and DNA exonerations.

It's only recently that we've

begun to talk about mass exonerations,

which would be a group of people

being exonerated all together.

It's happened in Philadelphia,

it's happened in Massachusetts,

which has recently had the exoneration

of some 20,000 people after it was shown

that a chemist in the police lab

was really faking lab results

and they had to sort of wipe away

all of those convictions.

I think what was striking to me

about this story is the length of time

the corruption went on and the fact that

so many people didn't stop it.

So many different agencies, whether it's the FBI,

Internal Affairs of the police department.

What Clarissa said it to me,

Everybody knew but nobody did anything.

I mean I think that's a society

we have to be asking ourselves

who do we believe?

And I think that's a very, very important

aspect of this story.

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