Take the lid off probes of officers tied to wrongful convictions

Let’s agree that crimes allegedly committed by police officers should not be quietly swept under the rug.

That’s what then-Police Board President Lori Lightfoot thought back in November 2017, when 15 wrongly convicted South Siders were exonerated. They had been framed for drug crimes between 2003 and 2008 by former Chicago Police Sgt. Ronald Watts and his crew.

Documents showed that Watts and his team planted evidence and fabricated charges against the victims.

At that point, Watts and an officer under his command already had been sent to federal prison — four years earlier, in 2013 — for stealing money from a drug courier who’d been working as an FBI informant. But Lightfoot warned that other officers involved in the scheme “should not be able to walk away with impunity.”

“Any of those officers who remain on the job must be quickly brought to justice through criminal prosecution and or disciplinary action,” the future mayor said then. “And the taxpayers should not be further insulted by having to foot the pensions of these officers who have clearly acknowledged being involved in criminal conduct . . .”

So here we are, 2½ years later, and nothing has happened.

Dusting off bad playbook

On the contrary, it looks to us like somebody is dusting off the playbook that allows accused officers to stay on the force and build up their pensions without being called to account. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported in the David Koschman case — a classic and irrefutable example — when some police officers in that case finally were recommended for firing, they retired, dodged disciplinary action and held on to their pensions.

When dealing with the career of a police officer, an investigation must be more than thorough. But within a certain reasonable frame of time — many months, perhaps, but not many years — the investigation should be completed and the consequences carried out.

In just that way, it is way past time for investigations to be completed into the alleged misconduct of officers in Watts’ old crew.

So far, the number of victims of Watts and his tactical team who have been exonerated is 75. Their prison sentences, now overturned, added up to more than 235 years.

But 15 officers tied to Watts remain on desk duty, even now, as investigations into their conduct drag on.

The Cook County state’s attorney’s office no longer will accept the testimony of 10 of the officers because they have been found to have lied about what they did. The Illinois Appellate Court has called Watts and his team “corrupt police officers” and “criminals.” In 2018, the chief justice of the Illinois Court of Claims wrote, “Chicago Police Sgt. Ronald Watts and his team of police officers ran what can only be described as a criminal enterprise.”

Moreover, evidence about the Watts crew’s illegal behavior has been piling up in civil cases filed by victims.

What’s known is shocking

It’s absurd that investigations of these officers have been left hanging by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the city’s police watchdog, for 2½ years.

What’s in the public record already is shocking.

One officer admitted that for 10 years when he was patrolling housing projects, he would detain and search everyone and also testified in two separate cases that he was in two different places at the same time. Another officer admitted that he would fill out police reports beforehand — including direct quotes — and then fill in blanks after the fact.

The University of Chicago Law School’s Exoneration Project counts hundreds of cases in which defendants credibly claim that Watts’ unit arrested them on false charges, lied in reports and lied on the witness stand.

We understand that Lightfoot, as mayor, has no direct control over COPA. But she has a bully pulpit she can use to push the investigations forward, as she tried to do in 2017.

Just last week, Lightfoot called for the firing of officers who covered their badge numbers and name tags and were photographed giving the finger to protesters. And when a number of officers were caught on video last week making popcorn, drinking coffee and sleeping on a couch in U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush’s campaign office, Lightfoot called them out.

But members of Watts’ old team plug along on desk duty. They collect their salaries and build up their pensions.

All due speed

When matters like this are under investigation, City Hall tells us, the process is confidential and nothing can be shared with the public. That’s fair, but only if the investigation is being conducted with all due speed.

“As long as you are putting a lid on information, you have a responsibility to act very quickly,” said Locke Bowman, clinical professor of law and executive director of the MacArthur Justice Center.

We don’t mean to suggest that COPA is just another useless foot-dragging agency. We’re told COPA has some good investigators, although there has been significant staff turnover.

But the public deserves answers more quickly. And if any of the officers who worked with Watts were, in fact, doing their best to stay clean — and were not looking the other way — they deserve to have their names cleared.

No officer under investigation should be left on desk duty indefinitely.

All the victims of Watts and his crew were African American.

And all this injustice happened seven or more long years ago.

Chicagoans deserve to know in full — what happened and who did it?

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