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Legislator presses forward with facial recognition ban even after it helped solve Loyola student murder case in her district

Posted in Crime, CWB Chicago, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Dumb Bunny, Politics, Springfield, Who Cuts Your Hair?, WTF on March 27, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Rep. Kelly Cassidy and Jose Medina (Facebook, Dept. of Homeland Security)

By Tim Hecke | CWB Chicago

A bill that would bar Illinois law enforcement agencies from using facial recognition databases to help identify crime suspects is scheduled for a second day of legislative hearings, days after the technology helped Chicago police identify the man accused of murdering a Loyola University freshman in the bill’s sponsor’s own district.

House Bill 5521 is sponsored by Rep. Kelly Cassidy, who represents the 14th District, which includes Rogers Park. Cassidy introduced the measure last Wednesday, hours before 18-year-old Sheridan Gorman was shot and killed at the Loyola Beach pier. Chicago police have since charged Jose Gregoria Medina Medina, a 25-year-old Venezuelan citizen, with Gorman’s murder.

An arrest report obtained by CWB Chicago describes how detectives worked to identify Medina as the shooter. Among the investigative steps, an officer wrote that video images of the gunman were sent to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which “returned matching candidate Jose Gregoria Medina Medina.”

If passed, HB5521 would prohibit Illinois law enforcement agencies from obtaining, retaining, possessing, accessing, requesting, using, or entering into agreements with third parties, state or local government agencies, or federal agencies to use certain biometric identification systems, including facial recognition.

It also bars the Secretary of State from providing facial recognition search services except when issuing a mobile driver’s license or identification card. That facial recognition database is the most commonly used within CPD.

On Sunday, CWB Chicago published a report detailing dozens of violent crimes — including murders, robberies, and sex offenses — that Chicago Police Department detectives have solved with the assistance of facial recognition. The technology has proven particularly useful in cases involving the CTA, where offenders are often anonymous, crimes can be random, and the transit system’s high-definition cameras provide broad coverage.

Article continues here.

Related: “Facial recognition helps cops solve some of Chicago’s most heinous crimes. This state legislator wants to shut it down,” “Hundreds of police departments use camera company (seen below) accused of breaking state law”

Automated license plate readers such as this one are installed throughout Barrington Hills.

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Facial recognition helps cops solve some of Chicago’s most heinous crimes. This state legislator wants to shut it down.

Posted in Crime, CWB Chicago, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Dumb Bunny, Politics, Springfield, Who Cuts Your Hair? on March 23, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Illinois Rep. Kelly Cassidy, center, and images of some of the people who have been charged with violent crimes following investigations that involved the use of facial recognition. (Facebook, Chicago Police Department)

By Tim Hecke | CWB Chicago

An Illinois state legislator wants to strip law enforcement of a tool that has helped detectives solve murders, robberies, kidnappings, and sexual assaults — including some of the most violent crimes to hit the CTA in recent years: facial recognition.

When Chicago police detectives needed to figure out who stabbed 37-year-old Dominique Pollion to death and left his body on a Blue Line train in the Loop in January, facial recognition helped them get the investigation on the right track.

By feeding high-quality CTA video images into the Illinois Secretary of State’s database of state ID and driver’s license photos, detectives narrowed their focus to possible matches, including 21-year-old Demetrius Thurman. As their investigation continued, investigators allegedly found video on Thurman’s phone that shows him committing the crime.

Powerful stuff. But if a North Side state legislator gets her way, Illinois police will soon be barred from using any facial recognition database, including the Secretary of State’s, to do their work ever again.

The bill is called the Illinois Biometric Surveillance Act, and it’s being pushed by Rep. Kelly Cassidy, who represents most of Rogers Park and Edgewater in Springfield. Cassidy’s office did not respond to an email seeking comment for this story.

Her proposed law would ban the use of facial recognition and other biometric identifiers by law enforcement statewide. No agency could use the technology or enter into an agreement with a state or federal agency to use it. The bill would still allow “fingerprinting pursuant to an arrest or conviction, or to collect forensic evidence at a crime scene.” The bill does not include the ultimate biometric, DNA, among its “biometric identifiers.”

To be clear about how the tool works: a potential facial recognition match alone is not enough to file charges. Detectives use it to help generate leads and identify potential suspects.

Article continues here.

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Chicago careens toward insolvency

Posted in Cook, County, Look For The Union Label, Pension Funding, Politics, Taxes, Unions, Washington Post, Who Cuts Your Hair? on March 16, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) on Feb. 26. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Editorial Board | The Washington Post

It takes a long time to kill a city, and the bigger the city, the longer it takes. But Chicago’s “public servants” have done a fine job speeding up the process.

The Windy City was forced this week to put off a planned sale of $292 million in tax-exempt municipal bonds, part of an $800 million debt-service package. Authorities blamed volatility caused by the Iran war, but other bonds were priced without incident.

The truth is it’s never a good time to float the kind of debt Chicago wants. The city seeks to structure bonds to make no payments at all — not even interest — for the first couple years. That obviously raises the overall cost of borrowing.

The city has played this same old game for decades. Keep public-sector unions happy by punting obligations onto future taxpayers. Cover the snowballing costs with more borrowing and short-term fixes, such as the city’s 2008 decision to sell off 75 years worth of parking meter revenue for a one-time, $1.15 billion payment.

Pension payments and debt service now consume almost 40 percent of the city’s operating budget. Seven of the country’s 10 worst-funded pensions are in Chicago. The best of those, the Chicago TranChicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) on Feb. 26. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)sit pension, has roughly half the assets needed to pay promised benefits. Those in the worst condition, covering police and firefighters, are now less than 20 percent funded because of a “sweetener” rammed through the state legislature last year.

Last month, two ratings agencies downgraded the city’s debt. The school district’s bonds are already rated as junk. The city council’s laudable rebellion in the fall against the feckless budget proposed by Mayor Brandon Johnson (D), a former organizer for the teachers union, was a hopeful sign, but the modest tweaks they forced him to accept in December won’t change the fiscal trajectory.

Article continues here.

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Editorial: Brandon Johnson and friends think it’s ‘a privilege to do business in Chicago.’ Wrong.

Posted in Chicago Tribune, Cook, County, FUBAR, Look For The Union Label, OP/Ed, Politics, Property Taxes, Taxes, Unions, Who Cuts Your Hair? on August 7, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Pedestrians walk past Boeing International Headquarters in Chicago in 2019. Boeing later left Chicago for the suburbs of Washington, D.C. | Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune

By The Editorial Board | Chicago Tribune

In the later years of Richard M. Daley’s mayoralty and especially during the tenure of Rahm Emanuel, the city of Chicago served as a magnet for corporate headquarters relocations, particularly from the suburbs.

United Airlines moved its headquarters to Willis Tower from Elk Grove Village, shifting thousands of employees to the city. Kraft Heinz consolidated its base in Chicago from Northfield. McDonald’s moved its home office to the West Loop from its longtime base in west suburban Oak Brook in 2018. These are just a few of the examples.

At the time of these moves, the city was perceived as hot. Even companies that didn’t go so far as to relocate their headquarters to Chicago opened satellite offices in the city, believing that they needed a physical presence to attract younger workers.

The era we’re talking about wasn’t that long ago — less than a decade — but it feels like ancient history.

Post-pandemic, downtown Chicago lost its mojo and, unlike New York City, has failed to recover adequately in the midst of relentless fiscal crises and poor municipal leadership. Chicago’s progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson, routinely describes the corporate decision-makers in his city as the “ultra-rich” (when he refers to them at all).

With Johnson declaring on Tuesday that the city’s finances are at a “point of no return” — whatever that means — the mayor and his progressive allies believe they may have found the answer to their seemingly never-ending quest for massive revenue infusions that affect only the wealthy. A heretofore obscure advocacy group, the so-called Institute for the Public Good, has proposed a new city tax on companies and other large employers that would require them to pay 5% of their total payroll for anyone working in the city who makes $200,000 or more (including noncash compensation like stock options).

The group estimates such a levy would generate $1.5 billion a year. Voila! A Chicago budget deficit now topping $1 billion in 2026 would disappear thanks to something this group pitches as a “tax on the privilege of doing business in Chicago.”

Read more here.

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WATCH: Chicago mayor labels state budget ‘austere,’ wants tax on ‘ultra-rich’

Posted in Cook, County, Deception, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Ethics, Immigration, Politics, Preckwinkle's Rules of Order, Springfield, Taxes, The Center Square, The Chicago Way, Unions, Who Cuts Your Hair? on June 4, 2025| 1 Comment »

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson during a news conference in Chicago June 3, 2025 | Chicago Mayor’s Office / Facebook

By Jim Talamonti | The Center Square

The mayor of Chicago has followed the lead of some Illinois state lawmakers by connecting state and local budget challenges with potential moves by the Trump administration.

Mayor Brandon Johnson spoke with members of the media Tuesday about Illinois’ record-high $55 billion-dollar spending plan passed by the General Assembly over the weekend.

“This budget was austere. There are budgetary challenges all over the country, and we’re faced with that because we do have a great deal of uncertainty, quite frankly, animosity that’s coming from the federal government,” the mayor said.

Johnson called President Donald Trump’s administration “tyrannical.”

State Sen. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, called out Illinois Democrats for blaming the state’s fiscal woes on the president.

“Hang on, I bet Donald Trump called the mayor of Chicago and asked him to tax everybody in Illinois,” Rose said during final budget debates over the weekend.

“This sinister man, orange man bad, made you put the $20 million in for the South Side Organizing Project,” Rose said in another speech on the Illinois Senate floor.

More including video here.

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Chicago drivers face lower speed limit, more cameras after $28M fine drop

Posted in Cook, County, Crime, Illinois Policy Institute, Politics, Preckwinkle's Rules of Order, Taxes, Traffic, Who Cuts Your Hair? on December 12, 2024| Leave a Comment »

By Patrick Andriesen | Illinois Policy Institute

Chicago speed cameras collected $28 million less in ticket revenue through September than during the first nine months of 2023, but two things could drastically change that.

First, city leaders have considered lowering the citywide speed limit from 30 to 25 mph.

Second, Mayor Brandon Johnson has an initial OK for more speed cams to raise $11 million next year to restore police positions related to the federal consent decree.

During his campaign, Johnson told voters a lower speed limit was nothing but a “cash grab.” He promised to eliminate speed cameras, calling them “regressive taxation.”

But now that he wants a budget that spends nearly $1 billion more than Chicago will receive, it is clear he sees speed cameras as money machines. Regressive taxation and cash grabs are OK when he needs cash.

Speed cameras issued $54 million worth of fines between January and September 2024, which was $28 million less than during the same period a year earlier. They still slapped motorists with a ticket every 20 seconds, Chicago Department of Finance data shows.

While 1.18 million tickets were issued, just 804,197 carried fines and the rest were warnings, according to a Freedom of Information Act request. Two-thirds of the fines were paid on time, but more than half of the revenue came from late fees.

Late penalties more than double the cost of a speed camera ticket, turning a $35 fine into an $85 ticket or a $100 fine into a $244 ticket.

About $35.2 million worth of the ticket revenue came from $35 fines for driving 6-10 mph over the posted speed limit, with one-third of those tickets incurring a late fee.

The remaining $18.8 million in revenue came from 11 mph-plus tickets, which incurred late penalties at an even higher rate of 41%.

A lower speed limit could hit Chicago drivers hard: one city saw speed camera tickets increase 81% when it dropped its limit. After 18 months, the revenues were still 75% higher, according to the Journal of Public Economics.

That was essentially Chicago’s experience after former Mayor Lori Lightfoot lowered the speed camera threshold to fine drivers for going 6-10 mph over the limit. Chicago speed cameras churned out eight times as many tickets per day in the seven months after Lightfoot’s change.

Read more here.

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Tensions grow between city, state and federal government over influx of migrants

Posted in Cook, County, Immigration, Politics, Preckwinkle's Rules of Order, Pritzker’s Rules of Order, Springfield, Taxes, Who Cuts Your Hair? on January 27, 2024| 1 Comment »

WELCH-HARMON-JOHNSON-JN-0344-700-700-p-C-100

By ANDREW ADAMS | Capitol News Illinois

Tensions rose again this week between Gov. JB Pritzker’s office and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson over how to handle the tens of thousands of people who have arrived in the state since August 2022 via buses or planes sent from Texas.

The most recent back-and-forth between the two came in response to the city’s recent shift in its migrant strategy: away from building new shelters or even increasing capacity of existing shelters, instead focusing on getting migrants out of shelters and into other forms of housing.

The state had previously committed $65 million to building a shelter in Chicago in November – an effort that has still not come to fruition.

“I’m deeply concerned,” Pritzker said Monday. “We do not have enough shelter as it is in the city of Chicago. The city has not told the state where they would like us to put our resources. We can’t help if they don’t identify those locations.”

Johnson’s administration is gearing up to enforce the city’s 60-day eviction policy at Chicago’s shelters. Enforcement of that policy was initially delayed due to dangerously cold weather but is set to go into effect next week.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Johnson suggested that the state build shelters outside of his city.

“The state of Illinois can build a shelter anywhere in the state of Illinois, the state does not have to build a shelter in Chicago,” Johnson said.

Johnson also said Wednesday that he did not think his administration was at odds with Pritzker.

Read more: Patchwork aid system and uncertain funding leave thousands of migrants in limbo

Within city government, Chicago’s shelter policies have drawn criticism. Thursday, a group of 16 city aldermen penned a letter asking the mayor to walk back the eviction policy.

“To stand by the decision to impose 60-day limits on shelters without addressing these systemic issues leaves new arrivals without options for housing or shelter,” the aldermen wrote. “This situation simply should not be acceptable.”

The article continues here.

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Op-Ed: The Chicago mayor’s hat trick of dreadful policies

Posted in Cook, County, FUBAR, OP/Ed, Politics, Property Taxes, Real Estate, School Districts, Taxes, Topics Of Interest, Unions, Who Cuts Your Hair?, WTF on December 28, 2023| 1 Comment »

Brandon Johnson

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson raises the gavel to end the city council’s meeting and his inauguration Monday, May 15, 2023, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

By Charles Lipson | University of Chicago

When your city elects a mayor whose main job qualification is “organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union,” you get what you paid for, or rather what the powerful CTU paid for. With Mayor Brandon Johnson, you get a special bonus, an unwelcome one. His proposed policies are unworkable, unaffordable, and deeply unpopular in the city that elected him less than a year ago.

Three policies stand out for particular ridicule. Mayor Johnson wants to:

  • Start city-owned and -operated groceries in some underserved areas. The government that wants to take on these difficult new tasks is already failing at such basic services as fixing potholes and policing dangerous neighborhoods.
  • Ticket the buses bringing illegal immigrants to Chicago, mostly from Texas. He calls them “rogue buses” because they are not “coordinating” with the city. Giving them a ticket or even impounding the vehicles is his solution. The bus companies’ own solution is to drop off the passengers in the suburbs, which immediately send them to Chicago. Johnson then rages at the Texas governor and never mentions President Joe Biden.
  • Close down all the selective-enrollment (magnet) schools in Chicago, the only ones where students actually read above grade level. If we judge by the likely outcome, Johnson’s policy is really designed to drive middle-class families with kids out of the city. The teachers union backs the plan, enthusiastically. They must know how good the other schools are since the president of the CTU sends her own child to a private school. Meanwhile, she is working with Gov. J.B. Pritzker to kill school choice for everyone else.

The local joke about Mayor Johnson is that his only success has been to lower the price of downtown Chicago real estate.

How do voters like Johnson’s ideas and his administration? Not much, it turns out. His poll numbers are roughly the same as those for used car salesmen with loud suits and back lots filled with rusting clunkers. The mayor’s erstwhile supporters have abandoned him. Except for the Chicago Teachers Union.

Read more here.

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