On December 14, 2003, 17-year-old Cameo Potts visited his girlfriend who was living in the Ida B. Wells public housing project in Chicago, Illinois. As he was walking through the lobby on his way out of the building, Chicago police officer Kallat Mohammed stopped him.
Potts later would recall that Mohammed "grabbed me and slammed up against the wall." Potts explained that he had been visiting his girlfriend. At the same time, he noticed that other police officers, including Sgt. Ronald Watts, had detained several others against the wall of the lobby.
Potts and the others were handcuffed and taken to the police station. Potts thought he was being charged with trespassing, but learned he was charged with possession of 17 packets of heroin. The police report of the arrest said Potts was seen holding a clear plastic bag containing the packets of heroin.
On May 20, 2004, Potts pled guilty in Cook County Circuit Court to possession of heroin. He was sentenced to 18 months on probation. He later was jailed for 43 days on a probation violation.
In 2012, Watts and Mohammed were caught on tape stealing money from a man they believed was a drug courier, but who was in fact working as a confidential FBI informant. In 2013, Watts and Mohammed pled guilty in U.S. District Court to taking money from the informant. Mohammed was sentenced to 18 months in prison, and Watts was sentenced to 22 months in prison.
Federal prosecutors said Watts “used his badge and his position as a sergeant with the Chicago Police Department to shield his own criminal activity from law enforcement scrutiny. He recruited another CPD officer into his crimes, stealing drug money and extorting protection payments from the drug dealers who terrorized the community that he [Watts] had sworn to protect.”
In 2006, Ben Baker was convicted twice—once alone and a second time with his wife, Clarissa Glenn, on charges of narcotics possession based on false testimony from Watts. In 2015, Joshua Tepfer, an attorney at the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School, filed a petition to vacate Baker’s first conviction, citing the corruption of Watts and his unit. The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) agreed in January 2016 that Baker’s first conviction should be vacated, and the petition was granted. Later in 2016, a petition filed on behalf of Baker and Glenn also was granted.
Beginning in December 2016, Tepfer and attorney Joel Flaxman filed motions for new trials on behalf of dozens of men and women who claimed they were falsely convicted based on the corruption of Watts and his team. “The full known scope of the corrupt, more-than-decade-long criminal enterprise of Sergeant Watts…shows that Sergeant Watts led a tactical team of Chicago police officers that engaged in systematic extortion, bribery, and other related crimes…from as far back as the late 1990s through 2012,” their motions said.
The CIU began investigating the cases and agreed that the convictions should be vacated and dismissed. By 2024, nearly 200 convictions tainted by Watts and members of his unit had been dismissed.
On September 23, 2024, Potts’s conviction was vacated and the case was dismissed. On February 5, 2025, Potts was granted a certificate of innocence and he filed a claim for compensation from the state of Illinois.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 04-17-2025
Last Update Date: 04-17-2025
