Chicago PD season 7, episode 6 recap: False Positive

Getting the right man

Despite the horrible news, the show must go on, and so Intelligence continued their hunt for the real killer. Hank and Jay pay another visit to the tech lab, to lay into them the severity of trouble they caused for their case.

Even more shocking? The so-called genius technology is flawed: the engineers who designed it were white, and they only tested it on their Caucasian peers. To put it bluntly, the software’s precision was nonexistent when it came to people of darker skin. So their African American suspect Marcus West? He lost his life due to an inexcusable technical screwup.

When Voight informed Superintendent Crawford about this horrible mistake, Crawford blamed Halstead, and said that he should take the heat. Voight immediately defended his detective, saying Crawford was the only one to blame, as he was the one who stoked so much faith on an unpredictable system.

After getting into it with Crawford, Voight went back to the district where Upton and Adam Ruzek (Patrick John Flueger) were back at the drawing board, looking at suspects. Out of the four they had, Voight proposed that Kareem’s second in command, Prophet, was cold-blooded enough to take out two innocent kids.

Voight worked his magic by paying a visit to Kareem and Prophet. He told them that Intelligence was working a theory, and would be knocking on Prophet’s door first, to make an example of him. It worked, because Prophet got spooked enough to run to his sister’s house and hide the evidence.

Voight and his team were right on his tail, and watched him lug the duffel full of drugs and cash out to his car. When the coast was clear, Hank snatched it up as evidence. Now they had their man, and solid evidence that proved Prophet was the one who killed those two boys.

Even though they had the right guy, there was still the elephant in the room: Marcus Jerome West and the technological idiocy that got him killed. How would Crawford wriggle his way out of that debacle? Hank had one last trick up his sleeve, and no, it wasn’t pretty.

Voight met Kareem in secret, and gave him the duffel. He told Kareem everything: about Prophet, about the kids, all of it. Now Kareem had to settle the score, and the only way to do that was to make Prophet a dead man.

The final moments of “False Positive” overlaid a news conference of Crawford, with the beatdown of Prophet. Prophet got what he deserved, and Crawford got to save his own ass by telling the public that Marcus was their man after all. And why would the people of Chicago wonder otherwise? Voight made sure their actual lead was buried – literally.

A glum Jay sat down with Hank in his office, and calmly asked him if he did what Jay thought he did. In his typical fashion, Voight avoided the question by posing a thought: for once in his life, couldn’t Halstead let things be?

For the latest Chicago PD season 7 spoilers and news, plus more on the entire series, follow the Chicago PD category at One Chicago Center.