@ravengeary.bsky.social
Hate mail: raven@unraveledpress.com
arrested protester (eyes obscured for privacy) rushed away by border patrol agents in gas masks
Woman gripping Mexican flag face to face with border patrol agent in gas mask
9/27/25
29.09.2025 03:30 — 👍 154 🔁 45 💬 2 📌 0Steve is fine/uninjured. Some neck pain from being tackled.
His biggest concern while in custody was what was happening to people outside the facility since he couldn't hear any of the munitions from inside.
In typical Steve fashion, he also made a number of new friends while detained.
"It’s just ongoing ethnic cleansing. It’s just guys in masks moving swiftly, picking people off that they know no one will care about and no one will plan a protest for. No one will lower the flag for."
Really brilliant work on this fucking nightmare.
I worked with the reporters at @unraveledpress.com and the Chicago Reader's @mulchy.bsky.social yesterday to cover a brutal day of ICE activity in the Chicago suburbs. By day's end, immigration agents had killed a man and, only a few miles away, subjected protestors to tear gas and pepper balls.
13.09.2025 21:33 — 👍 143 🔁 78 💬 1 📌 2As I said yesterday, there's no satisfaction in being right.
I am simply empty now, gutted by a week of witnessing + experiencing police brutality while my supposed "colleagues" grieve a man who, through his rhetoric, incited this ethnic cleansing campaign, alongside Silverio's death.
I said weeks ago ICE would kill someone at a traffic stop here. I've spent the last five years writing about policing and, more recently, specifically CPD tactical units, our most violent officers. I knew ICE would use these same tactics.
13.09.2025 22:33 — 👍 83 🔁 25 💬 1 📌 0I have no words left to describe the horrors ICE has unleashed on Chicago this week.
The insanity I feel is magnified by a national press that is drastically out of alignment with events on the ground, focusing on barbs traded between electeds and a total misdirection over the National Guard.
Some personal context on this reporting:
All of this happened just a few miles from where I grew up, in the near west Cook County burbs.
My mom and her friends rode their bikes through these neighborhoods and around the ICE facility where militarized agents assaulted community yesterday.
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New It Could Happen Here Mia talks with Unraveled journalist Raven about the impending deployment of the National Guard, ICE and the Border Patrol to Chicago and how the city is preparing to resist. @miawong.bsky.social @unraveledpress.com https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/chicago-prepares-for-occupation-292122250/
New It Could Happen Here
Mia talks with Unraveled journalist Raven about the impending deployment of the National Guard, ICE and the Border Patrol to Chicago and how the city is preparing to resist.
@miawong.bsky.social @unraveledpress.com
www.iheart.com/podcast/105-...
This was incidental to our main line of reporting but it’s astounding how quickly CPD’s license plate reader network has expanded in less than three years.
Your every move is tracked, and in exchange, they still can’t clear cases.
Automated license plate readers "are seemingly popping up everywhere—including 650 new cameras in Illinois cities since 2023."
Flock "collects 20 billion license plate scans per month."
"[W]e don't really have privacy or rights anymore.”
#Illinois #USA #Gaza #Palestine #Israel #Policing #Genocide
If you want to get an idea of what your local department may have purchased with these grants (2/3 of the total went to surveillance tech), we mapped them all for you.
19.08.2025 21:48 — 👍 62 🔁 38 💬 0 📌 1Now that these license plate readers have proven so dangerous to the concept of Illinois as a safe haven for everyone from undocumented immigrants to abortion patients, we of course had a number of questions for Raoul's office about Flock & the ORC fund. They did not reply to our repeated requests.
19.08.2025 21:07 — 👍 57 🔁 10 💬 1 📌 0
The Office of Public Safety Administration IT Division has completed their search. Below are records responsive to your FOIA request. 1. 786 fixed ALPR camera units 2. 540 ALPR mobile camera units deployed on police vehicles 3. 60 active mobile ALPR units (quick deploy or trailer mounted)
CPD spent nearly all of their ORC money on overtime costs, not new cameras.
But in reporting this, we got an updated number of ALPRs from CPD:
They've added almost a thousand ALPRs since WBEZ last reported on them in April 2022. At the time, they reportedly had 433. Now they have 1,386.
Denver recently announced they were going to stop sharing their network with Loveland, Colorado after learning they had been sharing access to their network with Customs & Border Patrol agents.
19.08.2025 20:59 — 👍 48 🔁 8 💬 1 📌 0
Some communities aren’t waiting for the state or Congress to take action. Oak Park’s board voted this month to terminate their contract with Flock.
Austin, Texas recently did the same.
Some investigations are happening: The IL Secretary of State has said he is auditing departments’ use of Flock. U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi has initiated a Congressional investigation into Flock’s business practices.
19.08.2025 20:59 — 👍 48 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0All of this surveillance is in response to an overblown panic created by the retail industry.
“Targeting people who engage in more routine shoplifting with inflated penalties in an effort to get them to implicate others is reminiscent of the tactics of the War on Drugs,” said Ed Yohnka (ACLU).
These companies are of course deeply committed to advancing their AI practices. They promise police departments an ever expanding trove of data on people's movements and travel patterns, linked to personal identifying information scooped from data brokers. ALPRs form the lynchpin:
19.08.2025 20:55 — 👍 56 🔁 8 💬 1 📌 0
We mapped all of the grant recipients, the amount they were awarded by year, and how they spent the funds.
19.08.2025 20:53 — 👍 64 🔁 11 💬 2 📌 3Over $3.1 million was spent on Axon’s Fusus, a real time crime center platform that integrates private and public surveillance feeds as well as license plate readers and other data.
In Oak Lawn, for example, their Fusus integrated camera network swelled from 16 cameras in 2019 to 1,073 by 2024.
bar graph measuring amount of money received from ORC oak brook 1,059,389 cook county sheriff 987,006 chicago 615,539 arlington heights 560,750 orland park 541,845 wheaton 539,325 springfield 514,580 cicero 510,000
Oak Brook came out on top with the biggest award, receiving over $1 million dollars. This paid for ALPRs, body cameras, and real-time crime center software (Fusus), but also lesser known tech like StarChase GPS launchers.
19.08.2025 20:47 — 👍 49 🔁 7 💬 3 📌 0
Last week we reported on a Palos Heights cop who shared his Flock password with a DEA agent. Logs show the agent ran 24 searches, just a week after Trump’s inauguration, for an “immigration violation.”
Raoul's office did not respond to our questions about whether there would be an investigation:
Recent reporting from 404 illuminates a major concern re: Flock’s ALPR data specifically. ICE desperately wants access to their database, and in some instances, has already used it:
19.08.2025 20:43 — 👍 314 🔁 139 💬 13 📌 2
A pie chart titled “What cops bought” during 2023-2025 with a side note “100+ Illinois police departments spent state grants on ALPR cameras or related software and accessories. The purchases break down into the following categories: ALPRs: $5.6 million (38%) Fusus: $3.2 million (21%) Overtime: $2.7 million (18%) Video surveillance (PODS, etc.): $1.2 million (8%) Cellphone/vehicle forensics (Cellebrite, Graykey, etc.): $399,352 (3%) Vehicles: $421,889 (3%) GPS tracking devices: $211,522 (1%) Misc. tech: $154,053 (1%)
In Illinois, 100+ police departments were awarded $15 million to fight organized retail crime.
$5.6 million went toward ALPRs and software, mostly with Flock Safety. Some cities, like Wheaton, installed dozens of cameras despite significantly low crime rates.
@joeyneverjoe.bsky.social first reported on this pattern in May. It's a familiar tale: corporate backed media worked in tandem with police to gin up fears of mass theft rings.
Prosecutors jumped onboard. In CA, hundreds of millions of dollars are now promised to cops to protect retail interests:
NEW: In what appears to be one of the largest expansions of surveillance in IL history, we found hundreds of new Flock license plate readers—all paid for by AG Kwame Raoul's office in the last 3 years.
Issues with Flock Safety's data sharing practices are mounting. Will our sanctuary status hold?
“It is absolutely in the public interest to do this kind of journalism and the fact that the [Flock] CEO wants to write this off as clickbait shows he wants to disregard legitimate criticism,” EFF’s @maassive.bsky.social told @unraveledpress.com. unraveledpress.com/a-dea-agent...
11.08.2025 21:58 — 👍 179 🔁 74 💬 0 📌 4