Chicago PD season 7’s most WTF moments

1. Framing Marcus West for murder

What happened: The Intelligence Unit uses a flawed facial recognition system to identify Marcus West as a double-murder suspect. When he won’t talk, Jay Halstead (Jesse Lee Soffer) has Marcus locked up, and Marcus then is murdered. To save face for everybody, Voight and Superintendent Crawford decide to lie and publicly state that the innocent man was the killer after all.

Why it’s a WTF moment: The Intelligence Unit has done some illegal and occasionally immoral things, but Chicago PD‘s whole premise is that they’re always working for the greater good of the city of Chicago. This was the first time in seven seasons that it felt like that was violated. This wasn’t only illegal and immoral, it was honestly infuriating.

This entire plotline was flawed on multiple levels. Not that the software didn’t work, but that the team so blindly trusted its results and didn’t continue following up on other suspects. Yes, Marcus West was in the area of the murders and no, he was no saint. But good police work means always verifying the information that you have; trusting one single source is just begging for a major issue like the one that developed. These cops know better than that.

Obviously Halstead never intended for Marcus to be murdered, although you can argue he should have also seen that coming. But you can kind of give him a pass as that was not at all what he was trying to do. then to see the behavior of particularly Voight, it was cringe-inducing.

To cover up a murder is bad enough, but Chicago PD viewers might see sweeping that under the rug as par for the course, since revealing it would have been a huge scandal for the team and the entire department, and if we know anything about the department bosses from the last six and a half seasons it’s that they’re self-serving. Fine, we’ll let you get away with that, even though it’s terrible.

But to frame an innocent man, too? To let this man’s widow and his son think he’s a murderer? To defame a member of your community just to save your behinds? That’s not helping Chicago; that’s hurting a citizen of Chicago solely to help yourself. This plotline was four bad decisions, one on top of another, culminating in some truly despicable behavior.

Hopefully, Chicago PD season 7 will see the truth come out when the show returns, because there ought to be some recognition that this was crossing a bigger line than ever before.

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