On July 17, 2007, 24-year-old Joseph Roberts left his uncle’s apartment and walked through the lobby of the 559 E. Browning Avenue building in the Ida B. Wells public housing complex in Chicago, Illinois.
Before he could leave the building, Chicago police officer Alvin Jones, a member of a team of police officers working under Sgt. Ronald Watts, stopped Roberts and said that he was being arrested and that the arrest was “a birthday present” for Sgt. Watts.
Roberts would later say that he was aware of Watts and his team because they had threatened to frame him for a non-existent crime unless he provided the officers with information about criminal activity in the housing complex.
Roberts, who was not carrying anything illegal, said that Jones handcuffed him and asked him where drugs were located. At that point, more officers, including Kallatt Mohammed, arrived. Roberts was taken to a vacant apartment on the sixth floor. Roberts was confronted with bags of drugs and a handgun. Officer Mohammed repeatedly asked him who the gun belonged to, and Roberts said he did not know.
At that point, Officer Jones took drugs out of his pocket and said Roberts was going to be charged. Roberts was charged with manufacturing and delivery of cocaine and heroin and illegal possession of a firearm.
On February 19, 2008, Roberts pled guilty in Cook County Circuit to possession of a controlled substance and illegal possession of a firearm. He was sentenced to six years in prison. He was released on parole in January 2010.
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. In 2021, Officer Jones was stripped of his police powers and placed on administrative leave. He resigned in 2022.
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 [Chicago Police Department] 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 April 2022, the total number of convictions vacated in the corruption scandal had grown to more than 200.
On December 12, 2023, Roberts’s conviction was vacated and dismissed. On February 22, 2024, he was granted a certificate of innocence, and he was awarded $98,920 in compensation from the state of Illinois. He also filed a federal civil rights lawsuit that was settled for $1,019,030 in 2025 by the city of Chicago. The settlement was part of a $90 million settlement of more than 170 cases brought by men and women whose convictions were the result of misconduct by Watts and his officers.
Additional information about the Watts scandal can be found here.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 01-08-2026
Last Update Date: 05-03-2026
