COMMENTARY: Next month, seven years will have passed since the video of the police murder of Laquan McDonald was released, precipitating a cascade of events that transformed the civic life of Chicago.
The criminal sentences served by Watts victims who have thus far been exonerated come to more than 450 years.
Anthony McDaniels, second from left, prepares to hug his attorney Joshua Tepfer as his sister LaShawn McDaniels and niece Lateisha Sellers, right, greet him outside Stateville Correctional Center on June 25, 2018. McDaniels' conviction on gun charges was dismissed in a case related to Chicago police Sgt. Ronald Watts.
Consider: High-rise public housing was the epitome of hypersegregation, and policing practices there were the purest form of apartheid policing. This extreme case illuminates the larger phenomenon and is therefore an invaluable resource for investigating the underlying pathologies of the prevailing modes of law enforcement. Yet it has scarcely figured at all in the discourse about “police reform.”
Chicago police Sgt. Ronald Watts leaves the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse on Feb. 13, 2012, in Chicago. He and another Chicago police officer were arrested on federal charges related to the theft of $5,200 from a man they believed was a drug courier but who was secretly cooperating with federal authorities.
At a time when the prevailing assumption is that the process of exonerating Watts victims has largely run its course, the immediacy of this human rights disaster and its claims on our attention are embodied, above all, by four men who have spent 19 years behind bars for two 2003 murders at the Harold Ickes public housing development. Former residents of the Prairie Courts public housing development, their names are Darnell and Donald Wilson, Raymond Youngblood, and Ahmad Poole.