CHICAGO (AP) — The Chicago City Council on Thursday unanimously approved a $90 million settlement for nearly 200 civil rights violations involving a notorious former police sergeant who framed people for drug crimes they didn’t commit in one of the biggest police misconduct scandals in the city’s history.
The groundbreaking deal closes out 176 lawsuits involving 180 wrongfully convicted people who spent close to 200 years combined behind bars, marking an end to one of the Chicago Police Department’s darkest chapters.
Disgraced former police Sgt. Ronald Watts and the unit he led for nearly a decade until 2012 was accused of planting drugs on suspects, falsifying police reports and falsely accusing housing project residents and others of drug crimes unless they paid the officers off.
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