Racial accountabilities: the legal legibility of racial state violence in the Special State’s Attorney Report on Police Torture in Chicago
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public inquiries command significant political capital for liberal democratic states that premise their authority on being accountable to a generalized public sphere. By attending to the particular relations of visibility that are generated by these investigative state institutions, this article reveals the differentiated forms of legal and political accountability that structure the proceedings and case history of the 2006 Special State’s Attorney Report, which investigated the torture of African American suspects by Chicago police officers under the supervision of former Commander Jon Burge. More specifically, this article documents the racial relations of power that shape how state actors and institutions are made to answer for their conduct, explicating the ‘racial accountabilities’ that mediated this public inquiry as well as the practices of state violence it was tasked with investigating. On the one hand, these forms of accountability focused blame on the individualized actions of particular state actors, abstracting their conduct from the broader systemic conditions that have rendered African American populations vulnerable to racial state violence. On the other hand, this article explains how the forensic gaze deployed throughout the legal investigations into torture reconstituted its victims as objects of law with differential access to its forms of protection and technologies of redress. By detailing the force and dimensions of these racial accountabilities, this article illustrates how public inquiries and other institutions of law can reproduce and extend racial fields of violence while also regenerating public confidence in the efficacy and equality of the state.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it