Public commenters tell Cook County tech panel technology deepens inequities, allege court-document fraud

Four members of the public used the committee's allotted public-comment time to press the Technology and Innovation Committee on how county technology is managed and who benefits from it.

George Blakemore said long-standing failures to embrace and equitably deploy technology have deepened historical injustice and urged the committee to confront what he characterized as a legacy of exclusion in technology planning. “With all the millions of dollars ... they didn't get them on time,” Blakemore said, arguing that technical expertise has sometimes been used to exclude rather than include residents.

Dennis White said younger residents are proficient with social media but now lag in basic literacy, warned of foreign cyberthreats and asked the county to prioritize technology education in schools. “Technology could be used for good or evil,” White said, and asked what the county will do “to make it better.”

Jessica Jackson alleged that the probate/public-administration office used technology to file a fraudulent court document, saying the same motion appeared twice with different case numbers and that one copy lacked a file stamp. Jackson named Louis G. Apostle as the public administrator and said portal deadlines — including an instruction she described as made at 3 a.m. on Feb. 18 — disadvantaged seniors who could not meet electronic-filing cutoffs.

Zoe Lee criticized slow county IT systems and linked system failures and weak technology access to neighborhood decline on the South Side, urging greater investment in schools and community access. “Why is our communities still looking like the way they look?” she asked, attributing part of the problem to insufficient local technology resources.

The committee did not respond with substantive rebuttals or actions during the meeting; the chair closed the public-comment period after the four speakers concluded. Several speakers raised specific allegations (including the fraud claim against a named public administrator) and procedural concerns (portal deadlines and system speed) that were not addressed on the record at this meeting.