Chicago police Sgt. Ronald Watts and a group of more than 10 officers terrorized residents of the Ida B. Wells public housing complex for over a decade, operating more like a street gang than a police unit. Members of the “Watts crew” extorted taxes from drug dealers for protection, seized drugs for their own private distribution and exploited gang tensions. When residents refused to cooperate with their criminal ends, the crew framed them on drug charges. And when fellow officers reported these abuses, they were subjected to harsh retaliation ordered by their superiors.
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To date, 212 convictions involving Watts and his crew have been vacated due to the criminal activity of these officers. The Watts scandal is on track to be one of the worst known cases of police abuse, likely to surpass even Los Angeles’ Rampart scandal.
The standard policy response to police misconduct rests on the “bad apples” theory that police abuse is the result of “problem officers” who engage in harmful behavior because of poor temperament, aggressive predisposition, unconscious or conscious biases, or some other fault buried inside the individual officer and not the institution of policing.
But the Watts crew is much more problematic than a few “bad apples.” The crew’s actions were not poor split-second decisions made in the fog of a tense situation or as the result of unconscious biases. Crew members engaged in outright criminal behavior and actively sought to conceal their actions. Peers and supervisors aware of Watts’ behavior chose to look the other way.
When, as sometimes happens, such a crew is criminally charged, a backward look at the histories of each member reveals large numbers of complaints alleging precisely the abuses for which they were indicted. Yet those complaints and the patterns that emerge from them were disregarded.
Those patterns of abuse leave a trail that can also be detected by science. In “Identifying Misconduct-Committing Officer Crews in the Chicago Police Department,” a new study published in PLOS ONE, we combine evidence from decades of journalistic investigations and known cases of abuse with advances in network science to develop tools to detect possible crews of criminal cops.
Using five decades of data on police misconduct collected by the Invisible Institute, we created the social networks among 32,000 officers who worked for the Chicago Police Department from 1971 to 2018. Starting with the signature characteristics of the Watts crew and other confirmed cases of abusive cops, we created a statistical model for detecting similar patterns of group misconduct — a sort of canary in the data coal mine.
We found evidence of at least 160 other possible crews consisting of 1,156 police officers. Although this represents less than 4% of all officers, these crews have an outsize impact on misconduct, accounting for 25% of all use-of-force complaints, 27% of all city payouts for civil and criminal litigations and 23% of all police-involved shootings. Arrest rates of these crews are three times higher than other CPD officers and are associated with a higher rate of complaints from Black and Latino Chicagoans.
These sorts of data analytics can penetrate official secrecy in ways typically only done by whistleblowers, undercover operations and investigative journalists. It makes the invisible visible, revealing possible abuses that would otherwise remain unseen. To be clear: Analyses of this sort are not findings of guilt but rather are red flags that warrant investigation by supervisors and review boards. Such analytics might also be incorporated into “early warning” systems designed to detect and reduce police misconduct.
Doing something about these crews is a much harder task. Police abuse is rarely investigated, and few officers are ever disciplined, let alone fired. Watts himself was arrested, not because of the mounting complaints by residents or reports by co-workers but because he attempted to rob an FBI undercover agent. Apart from short sentences given to Watts and one associate, not a single officer has been charged or disciplined. After the first massive exoneration in 2017, CPD put 15 officers on desk duty pending investigation. Four years later, they remain on the city payroll.
The impact of any police misconduct extends far beyond the harms caused to their victims and their families, eroding trust and alienating people from public institutions. The impact of crews like Watts’ is even more destructive, not only because of the scale of their criminal behavior but also because of the state’s failure to act. Removing bad officers should be a point of little controversy. The tools we have created make it possible to search out the most egregious instances of police abuse in a transparent, legal and inexpensive way if there is the will to do so.
But disciplining abusive officers is not enough. If there are currently hundreds of cop crews in police departments like Chicago’s, then there are thousands of officers who choose to look the other way. The code of silence — that idea that turning against one’s fellow officers is the ultimate sin — needs to be condemned and purged. Such a transformational change requires acknowledging that policing is not simply about protecting the public from crime and violence. It also requires protecting the public from dangerous cops.
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Andrew Papachristos is a professor of sociology and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Jamie Kalven is a writer, human rights activist and founder of The Invisible Institute. Rajiv Sinclair is a co-founder of Public Data Works.
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