Chicago police spent years trying to predict murder. We spent years reporting it. Amazon spent five minutes burying it

In 2014, I wrote a story for The Verge about a secretive Chicago police program that claimed it could predict violent crime before it happened. The department called it the "Heat List." Officers used arrest records, social networks, and police data to generate a list of people they believed were at heightened risk of being involved in a shooting — then showed up at those people's homes to let them know they were being watched.

It sounded like science fiction.

Here's that story.

Two years later, a RAND Corporation evaluation found the system largely failed to predict violence better than chance. I wrote about that too.

Here's that one.

Then I kept reporting. The story kept growing. Eventually it became something much bigger — about the people the system actually touched, the communities it shaped, the ways it failed.

That story is here.

And then it became a podcast.

James Edwards and I spent weeks in Chicago during the winter of 2023 knocking on doors, chasing leads, and trying to find the human story inside a giant machine. We were working for Wondery, which was in the middle of being absorbed by Amazon — a fact that would matter later.

At the center of the series is Young Pappy, a Chicago drill rapper whose killing became both a local tragedy and a kind of mythology. The show follows his brother Ryan Thomas, aka Budouble, and rapper Taysav, and traces the ways surveillance, gang databases, social media, and predictive policing all collided in their lives — in ways almost nobody outside Chicago fully understood.

The show is called Heat List. It came out earlier this year. It got some award attention. And then it got buried behind an Audible paywall with almost no promotional support, because by the time it was finished, the journalism operation at Wondery had been effectively shut down.

So most people who would care about it never heard it.

You can find it here.

If you can't access Audible or just don't want to sign up for another subscription, email me at matt@amphibian.media and I'll figure something out.

This project involved a lot of people doing serious work, and they deserve to be named. James Edwards was the host and lead reporter. Erisa Apantaku was the producer and an essential editorial collaborator. Philippa Geering executive produced. Krish Dineshkumar handled sound design and technical audio production. Alex Portfelix contributed to production and editorial development. Rachel Byrne did the story editing and narrative development. And N'Jeri Eaton provided executive support and advocacy for the project during production at Wondery — advocacy that kept this thing alive longer than it probably should have survived.

Most importantly: thank you to everyone in Chicago who talked to us. You know who you are.