Inside Chicago’s surveillance panopticon

MIT Technology Review · Feb 23, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Early on the morning of September 2, 2024, a Chicago Transit Authority Blue Line train was the scene of a random and horrific mass shooting. Four people were shot and killed on a westbound train as it approached the suburb of Forest Park. The police swiftly activated a digital dragnet—a surveillance network that connects thousands of cameras in the city. The process began with a quick review of the transit agency’s surveillance cameras, which captured the alleged gunman shooting the victims execution style. Law enforcement followed the suspect, through real-time footage, across the rapid-­transit system. Police officials circulated the images to transit staff and to thousands of officers. An officer in the adjacent suburb of Riverdale recognized the suspect from a previous arrest. By the time he was captured at another train station, just 90 minutes after the shooting, authorities already had his name, address, and previous arrest history. Little of this process would come as much surprise to Chicagoans. The city has tens of thousands of surveillance cameras—up to 45,000, by some estimates. That’s among the highest numbers per capita in the US. Chicago boasts one of the largest license plate reader systems in the country, and the ability to access audio and video surveillance from independent agencies such as the Chicago Public Schools, the Chicago Park District, and the public transportation system as well as many residential and commercial security systems such as Ring doorbell cameras. Law enforcement and security advocates say this vast monitoring system protects public safety and works well. But activists and many residents say it’s a surveillance panopticon that creates a chilling effect on behavior and violates guarantees of privacy and free speech. Black and Latino communities in Chicago have historically been targeted by excessive policing and surveillance, says Lance Williams, a scholar of urban violence at Northeastern Illinois University. That scrutiny has created new problems without delivering the promised safety, he suggests. In order to “solve the problem of crime or violence and make these communities safer,” he says, “you have to deal with structural problems,” such as the shortage of livable-wage jobs, affordable housing, and mental-health services across the city. Recent years have seen some effective pushback against the surveillance. Until recently, for example, the city was the largest customer of ShotSpotter acoustic sensors, which are designed to detect gunfire and alert police. The system was introduced in a small area on the South Side in 2012. By 2018, an area of about 136 square miles—some 60% of the city—was covered by the acoustic surveillance network. Critics questioned ShotSpotter’s effectiveness and objected that the sensors were installed largely in Black and Latino neighborhoods. Those critiques gained urgency with the fatal shooting in March 2021 of a 13-year-old, Adam Toledo, by police responding to a ShotSpotter alert. The tragedy became the touchstone of the #StopShotSpotter protest movement and one of the major issues in Brandon Johnson’s successful mayoral campaign in 2023. When he reached office, Johnson followed through, ending the city’s contract with SoundThinking, the San Francisco Bay Area company behind ShotSpotter. In total, it’s estimated the city paid more than $53 million for the system. In response to a request for comment, SoundThinking said that ShotSpotter enables law enforcement “to reach the scene faster, render aid to victims, and locate evidence more effectively.” It stated the company “plays no part in the selection of deployment areas” but added: “We believe communities experiencing the highest levels of gun violence deserve the same rapid emergency response as any other neighborhood.” While there has been successful resistance to police surveillance in the nation’s third-largest city, there are also countervailing forces: governments and officials in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs are moving to expand the use of surveillance, also in response to public pressure. Even the victory against acoustic surveillance might be short-lived. Early last year, the city issued a request for proposals for gun violence detection technology. Many people in and around Chicago—digital privacy and surveillance activists, defense attorneys, law enforcement officials, and ordinary citizens—are part of this push and pull. Here are some of their stories. Alejandro Ruizesparza and Freddy MartinezCofounders, Lucy Parsons Labs Oak Park, a quiet suburb at Chicago’s western border, is the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway. It includes the world’s largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright–designed buildings and homes. Until recently, the village of Oak Park was also the center of a three-year-long campaign against an unwelcome addition to its manicured lawns and Prairie-style architecture: automated license plate readers from a company called Flock Safety. These are high-speed cameras that automatically scan license plates to look for stolen or wanted vehicles, or for drivers with outstanding warrants. Freddy Martinez (left) and Alejandro Ruizesparza (right) direct Lucy Parsons Labs, a charitable organization focused on digital rights.AKILAH TOWNSEND An Oak Park group called Freedom to Thrive—made up of parents, activists, lawyers, data scientists, and many others—suspected that this technology was not a good or equitable addition to their neighborhood. So the group engaged the Chicago-based nonprofit Lucy Parsons Labs to help navigate the often intimidating process of requesting license plate reader data under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. Lucy Parsons Labs, which is named for a turn-of-the-century Chicago labor organizer, investigates technologies such as license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, and police bodycams. LPL provides digital security and public records training to a variety of groups and is frequently called on to help community members audit and analyze surveillance systems that are targeting their neighborhoods. It’s led by two first-­generation Mexican-Americans from the city’s Southwest Side. Alejandro Ruizesparza has a background in community organizing and data science. Freddy Martinez was also a community organizer and has a background in physics. The group is now approaching its 10th year, but it was an all-volunteer effort until 2022. That’s when LPL received its first unrestricted, multi-year operational grant from a large foundation: the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, known worldwide for its so-called “genius grants.” A grant from the Ford Foundation followed the next year. The additional resources—a significant amount compared with the previous all-volunteer budget, acknowledges Ruizesparza—meant the two cofounders and two volunteers became full-time employees. But the group is determined not to become “too comfortable” and lose its edge. There is a tenacity to Lucy Parsons Labs’ work—a “sense of scrappiness,” they say—because “we did so much of this work with no money.” One of LPL’s primary strategies is filing extensive FOIA requests for raw data sets of police surveillance. The process can take a while, but it often reveals issues. In the case of Oak Park, the FOIA requests were just one tool that Freedom to Thrive and LPL used to sort out what was going on. The data revealed that in the first 10 months of operation, the eight Flock license plate readers the town had deployed scanned 3,000,000 plates. But only 42 scans led to an alert—an infinitesimal yield of 0.000014%. At the same time, the impacts of those few flagged license plates were disproportionate. While Oak Park’s population of about 53,000 is only 19% Black, Black drivers made up 85% of those flagged by the Flock cameras, seemingly amplifying what were already concerning racial disparities in the village’s traffic stops. Flock did not respond to a request for comment. “We became almost de facto experts in navigating the process and the law. I think that sort of speaks to some of the DIY punk aesthetic.” Freddy Martinez, cofounder, Lucy Parsons Labs LPL brings a mix of radical politics and critical theory to its mission. Most surveillance technologies are “largely extensions of the plantation systems,” says Ruizesparza. The comparison makes sense: Many slaveholding communities required enslaved persons to carry signed documents to leave plantations and wear badges with numbers sewn to their clothing. The group says it aims to empower local communities to push back against biased policing technologies through technical assistance, training, and litigation—and to de­mystify algorithms and surveillance tools in the process. “When we talk to people, they realize that you don’t need to know how to run a regression to understand that a technology has negative implications on your life,” says Ruizesparza. “You don’t need to understand how circuits work to understand that you probably shouldn’t have all of these cameras embedded in only Black and brown regions of a city.” The group came by some of its techniques through experimentation. “When LPL was first getting started, we didn’t really feel like FOIA would have been a good way of getting information. We didn’t know anything about it,” says Martinez. “Along the way, we were very successful in uncovering a lot of surveillance practices.” One of the covert surveillance practices uncovered by those aggressive FOIA requests, for example, was the Chicago Police Department’s use of “Stingray” equipment, portable surveillance devices deployed to track and monitor mobile phones. The contentious issue of Oak Park’s license plate readers was finally put to a vote in late August. The village trustees voted 5–2 to terminate the contract with Flock Safety. Since then, community-­based groups from across the country—as far away as California—have contacted LPL to say the Chicago collective’s work has inspi