THE SYSTEM KNOWS
On Jon Burge’s Torture, Algorithmic Delay, and the Management of Accountability
by Floyd Webb
the question
Why is this so predictable?
Why does it arrive already familiar—already legible—before we’ve even finished reading the headline?
Yesterday morning I woke to a report from WTTW News: a system required to identify officers with repeated misconduct complaints—mandated under the city’s reform framework—will not be operational until at least 2027.
Not delayed for the first time.
Not newly conceived.
But still—years into a federal consent decree—unrealized.
The details follow a pattern that has become difficult to mistake. Required updates were not provided. City leadership was only formally briefed after the lapse became public. The timeline extends again into the future, framed in familiar language: data-driven, predictive, citywide, forthcoming.
Always forthcoming.
At a certain point, repetition stops being coincidence.
At a certain point, delay stops being failure.
The pattern begins to explain itself.
THE KNOWLEDGE WAS NEVER ABSENT
There is a particular kind of denial that presents itself not as falsehood, but as procedure. It sounds reasonable, administrative, even inevitable: we did not know.
But the historical record in Chicago shows that the issue has never been the absence of knowledge. During the years when Jon Burge and officers under his command tortured more than 100 Black men, those cases did not exist in obscurity. Allegations were raised in courtrooms, documented in motions, and repeated across prosecutions. The resulting confessions—many later shown to be coerced—were nonetheless used to secure convictions.¹
Prosecutors handled these cases even as allegations accumulated. No criminal charges were brought against Burge during those years.² The city’s own Chicago Police Department Office of Professional Standards documented the pattern as early as 1990, concluding that abuse had occurred and that misconduct was known within the department.³
the lockup
I was arrested multiple times coming home from work. Disorderly conduct, each time—a charge that functions as a catchall for Black presence read as provocation. I spent nights in the same lockups where Jon Burge’s victims were tortured. The officers who processed me did not know who I would become. They did not need to. They had what they needed: a body, a charge that would not hold, a night in the system to establish who was in control.
The men Burge interrogated were taken from those same holding cells. Some never fully returned. I walked out each time, charges dropped or dismissed, and went back to work. The system did not care what I would do next. It had already done what it needed to do: it had shown me, and anyone watching, that my movement through the city was conditional.
This is not an origin story. It is evidence. When I say the system knows, I mean it knew then too. It knew my arrests would not lead to convictions. It knew that was never the point.
The system did not fail to see.
It structured what seeing required.
SILENCE, STRUCTURE, AND THE CONDITIONS OF PERSISTENCE
It is often said that a “blue wall of silence” protected Burge. The blue wall of silence created an environment in which officers could act without immediate internal exposure.
What allowed the abuse to persist was the alignment of multiple institutional layers. Prosecutors continued to rely on confessions despite repeated allegations of coercion. Courts accepted those confessions. The city resisted disclosure and fought civil litigation. Each component functioned according to its own logic, but together they produced an apparatus in which misconduct could be known and still remain non-actionable.
This was not a breakdown.
It was coordination.
Silence created the initial enclosure.
Institutional practice sustained it.
THE NEW LANGUAGE OF OLD DELAYS
The current effort to build an Early Intervention and Support System—EISS—arrives framed as a technological solution to this history. The system is designed to aggregate internal police data and identify officers who may present a heightened risk of misconduct. It draws from civilian complaints, use-of-force reports, disciplinary records, lawsuits, and performance indicators, translating these into alerts for supervisors who are expected to intervene before misconduct escalates.
In principle, such a system promises prevention.
In practice, it produces signals without consequence. It does not mandate action. It generates alerts that remain subject to interpretation within the same institutional architecture.
Had such a system existed—and been enforced—during the years of Jon Burge, the patterns would have been visible. Complaints clustered. Allegations repeated. Civil suits accumulated. The signals were already there.
What was missing was consequence.
As Bernard Harcourt argues, predictive systems in policing do not eliminate harm; they redistribute it, concentrating attention within existing patterns while leaving underlying structures intact.⁴
And the delay itself becomes part of the design.
In the Burge years, the system claimed it did not know.
Today, it claims it is not yet ready to know.
The effect is the same.
CONTINUITY AND THE LIMITS OF REFORM
The development of EISS reflects a broader continuity within governance: reform remains embedded within the same institutional logic it is meant to address. Expertise is drawn from within existing systems, and solutions are structured to remain compatible with them.
Change occurs.
But within limits.
The system evolves without relinquishing control.
DATA, DISCRETION, AND THE REPRODUCTION OF PATTERN
The introduction of data does not eliminate discretion. It reorganizes it.
As Ruha Benjamin argues in her formulation of the “New Jim Code,” algorithmic systems often reproduce existing hierarchies while presenting themselves as neutral.⁵
Similarly, Virginia Eubanks demonstrates that automated systems applied to marginalized populations frequently function as tools of monitoring and control rather than accountability.⁶
As Stuart Hall observed, systems of policing are sustained not only through enforcement, but through the narratives that justify that enforcement.
Data does not replace those narratives.
It becomes part of them.⁹
THE DEEPER HISTORY OF SURVEILLANCE
The relationship between surveillance and control extends beyond the modern era. Simone Browne traces contemporary surveillance back to the plantation, where the monitoring of Black life was foundational to governance.⁷
As Michelle Alexander argues, systems of control do not disappear—they adapt, taking new forms while preserving their function.
EISS represents the current iteration of that evolution—a data-driven instrument of governance applied to the same populations, by the same institutional logic, under new terminology.
THE COST OF NON-ACCOUNTABILITY
Chicago has paid more than $700 million in police misconduct settlements since 2000, with Burge-related cases alone costing over $100 million.¹²
These are not anomalies.
They are outcomes.
Each delayed intervention becomes a future payout. Each ignored pattern becomes a financial obligation.
A system that takes years to build—and then produces alerts instead of action—costs more than the harm it claims to prevent.
As Jackie Wang argues, policing and municipal finance are intertwined, with punishment functioning as a mechanism of extraction.¹⁰
The city already pays for misconduct.
It chooses when to pay.
THE PATTERN AND THE QUESTION
From Jim Crow laws to the present, the pattern repeats: recognition, commission, delay, partial implementation, reset.
This essay does not resolve that pattern.
It names it.
What would force a system that already possesses knowledge to act on that knowledge?
THE SYSTEM KNOWS
The system knows.
It knew then.
It knows now.
What it controls is not awareness, but response.
This is what Achille Mbembe describes as Necropolitics: the power to decide whose vulnerability can be prolonged without urgency.¹¹
And as long as consequence can be deferred, what the system calls reform will remain indistinguishable from what it has always been.
Floyd Webb is a Chicago-based filmmaker, writer, and curator whose work draws from lived experience, independent cinema, and Black visual culture. His writing examines how systems of power are encountered in everyday life and sustained across institutions, from policing to media. He is the founder of Blacknuss Network and blacknuss.tv, platforms dedicated to alternative film circulation and community-centered storytelling.
Footnotes
Flint Taylor, The Torture Machine (2019).
Ibid.; People v. Orange (1995).
CPD Office of Professional Standards Report (1990).
Harcourt, Against Prediction (2007).
Benjamin, Race After Technology (2019).
Eubanks, Automating Inequality (2018).
Browne, Dark Matters (2015).
Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010).
Hall, Policing the Crisis (1978).
Wang, Carceral Capitalism (2018).
Mbembe, “necropolitics” (2003).
City of Chicago settlement data; see Invisible Institute and reporting.
Further Reading
Taylor, Flint. The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019.
Harcourt, Bernard E. Against Prediction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.
Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York: The New Press, 2010.
Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018.
Mbembe, Achille. “necropolitics.” Public Culture (2003).