What are we doing here?

Sure, we totally need the Death Star, but does it have to look so Death Star-y?

Jun 01, 2025

Hey hey hey hey hey! By the time you’re reading this I will be officially on my first proper vacation since September. Going down to Outer Banks with Katie and her family. A whole week. Excited! Never been. Drop some OBX recs in the comments or chat!

Weekly Index

The letters on a marquee sign outside Worcester East Middle School were rearranged on Memorial Day to spell out an unnamed racial slur. Local artist Jennessa went viral after a woman called the cops on her for painting a fun little mural. The Grafton Job corps is searching for homes for 30 homeless students after Trump-induced closure. At a Tuesday rally workers at Umass Memorial threatened to strike. No changes to the budget were made at a five hour city council budget review Tuesday night. No layoffs anticipated in public school budget proposal. The Central Massachusetts Regional Planning Board contracted an architectural firm to explore the divide caused by I-290 and the Vernon Street Bridge in particular on Wednesday. The Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science, a magnet school for WPI, may close due to state funding cuts. WPI announced layoffs, citing a common refrain: “rising costs” and “uncertainty.” A hostile takeover appears to be on among the siblings of the Market Basket dynasty. A counterfeit ticket scam threw a wrench in the Worcester Technical High School graduation. Police are investigating the death of a student at MCPHS. A Providence-Worcester line train derailed in Cumberland, Rhode Island. Umass Memorial is closing two clinics. E-bike rentals have returned to Worcester. So has a Hendrick Avercamp painting once owned by Robert Stoddard (Worcester Saruman), until it was stolen from him 47 years ago. It will be shown at Worcester Arts Museum.

What a time what a time...

Lessons from Little Rock—Mass capitulates to ICE—Catching up with the cranks—ICE’s backdoor to license plate data

Lessons from Little Rock

The following is an op-ed submitted by a reader. Please reach out at billshaner@substack.com if you have a letter to the editor you’d like to submit!

There is a controversial story of an American locality that resisted, ultimately unsuccessfully, federal policies that it abhorred. You may or may not agree with why this small entity held out against the Leviathan, but the facts should convince you: a city or state need not immediately give in, but rather has a huge range of options to push back against the enforcement of federal mandates. The only requirement is that the local leadership hold both firm moral convictions and the willingness to act on them.

The locality is Little Rock, Arkansas, and the year is 1957. The federal government has insisted on school integration—and the Supreme Court has blessed it as the law of the land. Unless a later Supreme Court overturns it or the Constitution is amended, the federal approach will eventually win.

But the Arkansas political class opposed integration. Some of those with local power were true believers, hardcore racist ideologues who fervently believed race-mixing would bring harm to all involved. Others among the local politicians were opportunists, blowing in the breeze of public opinion, but calculated that the racists would hold sway.

Locals used their power aggressively and fearlessly, whether formal or informal power. Among ordinary citizens, racist activists formed picket lines and blocked walkways. Groups of racist mothers held vigils with racist ministers, appealing to maternal protective sentiment, asking for the favor of the almighty, and providing fodder for local racist media.

The local holders of formal powers of office were mobilized as well. The racists on the school board stalled for time, narrowed the scope of integration, and exhausted legal and administrative appeals. And then in a climax but not a resolution, the racist governor called out the national guard to surround the high school and physically block Black children from entering.

Even after the coercive force of the federal government was used to overwhelm these acts of local resistance, the racist true believers continued. Racist school board members fired teachers and administrators who obeyed federal mandates. Racist students walked out of class in protest. Racist legal appeals were renewed, if futilely. Finally, the racist governor closed the entire city's high schools for a year. He even threatened to disband the entire school district in favor of privately contracted schools.

In the final estimation, theirs was a lost cause from the beginning. But in the moral calculus of the serious racist, in which every hour of integrated education was an injury, they delayed and deferred that inevitable outcome, delivering precious hours and days of relief. (This being the ugly other side of "justice delayed is justice denied.") That is what determined local resistance underpinned by a moral certitude can look like.

Neighbor, I hope you find nothing to admire in the cause of Little Rock's resistance. But the story itself should challenge you.

If you watched the Eureka Street seizures by ICE and Worcester PD in May 2025, and sensed their cruelty and immorality—were you morally revolted, regardless of whether it was technically federally legal? Did you just plain think it wasn't right?

If so, did you think that with as much conviction as a Little Rock racist thought that integrated schools weren't right?

And if you by chance touch a lever of official power here in Worcester, you must ask yourself: am I deciding to be less vigorous, less effective, and less courageous than the racists who controlled 1957 Little Rock? Because zero is what has come from any official lever of power: No lawsuit. No administrative decision-making to the contrary. No budget withholding. No personnel actions. No deployment of local forces. No shutdown of institutions or threats to disband.

The only two possibilities are that: 1. Worcester's city leaders support ICE enforcement just as Little Rock's former leaders supported keeping segregation; or, 2. Worcester's leaders have less moral courage of action in opposition to ICE's actions, than did Little Rock's racists in their opposition to school integration.

Worcester has a city government that pontificates about "protecting all residents" but can't even muster a level of resolve, initiative, and confidence equivalent to what avowed racists used to maintain school segregation a day, a week, or a year longer.

Randall Lucas is a recent Worcester transplant from the left coast who writes about software companies and getting elected officials to do what is right (or at least what they've promised).

What are we doing here?

News broke Thursday night Maura Healey is trying to get a meeting with Tom Homan, the “border czar” of the Trump Administration. When one side of the aisle is the neo nazi forced removal squads terrorizing families across the state, what are you doing reaching out across that fuckin aisle? You’re still getting on the sanctuary state list no matter how hard you try to say that we aren’t.

This on the same day that AGO Andrea Campbell puts out a public "know your rights” missive that heavily stresses what you don’t have the right to do

And on the same day that the Freedom Fighters Coalition pulls clear evidence of an ICE agent in Massachusetts with a neo nazi tattoo. A throwaway tweet of mine on the matter really took off there whoops.

Leading to a bunch of neo-nazis in my mentions of course.

What are we doing here? Why is our state government participating in this theater? Why is our governor making public statements like: “I won't get into specifics. But the general move and recognition that there needed to be more control brought to the border is absolutely correct. And certain things have been done that make a lot of sense.”

Friend of the newsletter Andrew Quemere did a great job breaking it down in a recent piece for Welcome To Hell World . Simply put Maura Healey is just a cop, doing cop things.

To understand why Healey is praising Trump, you need to understand that she is not a liberal or progressive—she is a cop. Before being elected governor, she was the state’s attorney general, which makes her a prosecutor, which makes her a cop. As attorney general, Healey constantly defended harmful and regressive policies like cannabis criminalization. She advocated for loosening our state wiretapping law to give police expansive surveillance powers. And she pushed the state legislature to not prohibit police from conducting violent “no-knock” raids at homes with elderly people and children. Her ideology is cop.

(Quemere’s newsletter The Mass Dump is well worth a follow!)

As we’ll get to, Flock license plate readers are all over Massachusetts and the Worcester area. ICE uses Flock’s massive database to stalk its victims. That story broke this week. And in that same week Healey is… trying to have dinner with the guy nominally at the head of this sick machine? Handing it to Trump on non-specified border policies?

In other ‘What are we doing here?’ news, via Unicorn Riot: “New Federal Task Forces Under 287(g) Could Form ‘ICE Army’ From National Guard, State, Local & College Police.” Under this obscure policy, there’s a “mode of agreement called the ‘task force model’ which would make police available from local or state agencies to work as extensions of federal immigration police.” Can we imagine Maura Healey coming around to this eventually? I can. Using 287(g) this way “would make it vastly more likely for immigrants to get detained during routine law enforcement encounters, and massively expand how many local police could participate in federally-managed ‘sweep’ operations.” Police departments like Worcester would be well prepared to participate in such sweeps, having used unhoused people for practice just about every week for years and years.

At the same time, courthouse raids are becoming more prevalent, here and across the country. Remember when Batista put out that “Executive order” that made zero changes to the city’s ICE policy? Stephen Miller—yeah that Stephen Miller, the one directly under Trump—called it an act of “legal insurrection.”

Feral.

Every day this very specific scenario comes into a sharper focus and no one with power to throw a wrench in the gears seems at all willing to do so. We have an opposition party on paper but in practice we have a second place party that exists to fundraise off losing. For instance, they’re throwing obscene money at trying to find the Liberal Joe Rogan while only paying the cheapest of lip service to ICE’s extreme excesses—and, as with Healey, pretty much endorsing it. Agreeing with the Death Star in theory and practice, intent and outcome, only quibbling on the aesthetics of it. Looks a little too Death Star-y.

That Liberal Joe Rogan plan is real by the way: The proposal, titled “Speaking With American Men: A Strategic Plan,” (reality > satire) will cost $20 million. Meanwhile Maura Healey is closing family shelters as more families than ever fall into homelessness. Rumor has it she’s considering a presidential run. In the press this tends to appear as an excuse for marked increases in cruelty. Calling it now: Vance’s 2028 VP pick. The “we’re not pretending anymore” ticket. “Obey.”

Heavy...

Before we get to the license plate readers, let’s take a breather.

Catching up with the cranks

New Candy Mero Carlson campaign slogan incoming...

Let’s get back to our regularly scheduled programming.

My god. Another notch in reality’s column. Satire could never be this funny. No one could intentionally write a bit so good.

The use of “programming” here is interesting. I take it as a confirmation of the theory I put forward in a piece last April: “Is city council just a weird reality TV show?” Between this and the five hour no change budget hearing this week... the thesis has legs.

Now to one of said TV show’s best characters: Steve Quist. The man who used to call me Diamond Bill back in my Worcester Magazine days has some new names for me now that he’s decided to hate me. He was big big mad about the HRC reporting in my last post, taking to his Worcester Politics 101 Facebook page to say...

In the post that’s got him all riled up here, I wrote...

...our city is controlled by a sick little posse of mediocre townie whites, all of them engaged in non-stop B movie machiavellianism.

As if to prove my point, the two comments on Quist’s post are both from police union officials.

Petrone is also a close friend of Candy Mero-Carlson. The two are often conspirators in their various B movie schemes. Like the one having to do with rental properties, a little league field and parking spaces, laid out in this post from 2022: “How embarrassing to be the Worcester City Council”

A sick little posse!

If you’re not blocked from Worcester Politics 101 get on over there and ask Quist for some more takes on Diamond Bill they are so funny. Keep em coming.

If you want to hear me read Quist’s rant in an Alex Jones voice head over to the latest podcast episode featuring Ashley Spring and go to the 38 minute mark. It really works.

Aright fun time over time to talk about license plate readers and ICE. But while I have you... one more pitch to give me money I use to survive so I can keep doing this stuff.

Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Merch Store

What the Flock

ICE has a backdoor to the opaque nationwide database of all the data collected by Flock license plate reader cameras. 404 Media Collective, an outlet doing some of the best work out there right now, broke the story earlier this week: “ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows”

Local police around the country are performing lookups in Flock’s AI-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system for “immigration” related searches and as part of other ICE investigations, giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for.

Flock has some 40,000 automatic license plate reader cameras spread across the country. These are cameras which collect all license plate data, not like a speed cam or a red light cam. It is a pure surveillance machine with no guardrails on how the data is used. ICE has figured out how to get it while maintaining they don’t have a contract. Local police departments with a Flock contract can access the entire thing at any time and don’t need a reason. When ICE asks them, they run a search. Cuz hey why not, we’re all on the same team right?

After Eureka Street, it’s easy to imagine WPD assisting ICE in this exact way while maintaining they aren’t technically assisting. He just asked me to do a little looksie! And, in the words of Officer Hanlon, he’s federal. So....

Luckily, Worcester doesn’t have a contract with Flock, though. I confirmed that with a city spokesman the other day. We have at least one ALPR within the city limits, apparently managed by a company called Genetec, a Flock competitor with an almost identical website.

Thanks to DeFlock, a righteous organization opposed to this hidden surveillance machine, we know where a good number of the cameras are.

There’s a Flock camera just up the street, in Boylston. On Rte 70, right across from that adorable little library.

A zoom out of DeFlock’s map shows there’s one in Oxford, four in Charlton, one in Marlborough. They’re all over the Mass Pike as well.

The story links out to two pages on the wonderful public records site MuckRock, showing the extent of Flock querries run by local police for ICE. Researchers got this information from the Danville Illinois police department. But, because the database is national, it shows use data all over the country, including Massachusetts. Springfield, Taunton, Chelsea, Lowell, Haverhill and other Massachusetts cities feature heavily.

I put all of it into a public drive folder for easy access. I searched about half of the dozen or so gigantic spreadsheets for Worcester and there were no hits. (If you find a Worcester mention please let me know but fair warning these spreadsheets are massive).

Two other, no less dark ways cops have misused Flock: In Wichita Kansas, a lieutenant used it to stalk his estranged wife. In Texas, cops used it to track down a woman they wanted to haul in for giving herself an abortion.

For these companies, how the cops use it is less important than whether they buy it. In the tech world there’s a public contract gold rush going on for police surveillance tech contracts. Flock is playing the same game that SoundThinking (Shotspotter) is playing that Axon (body cameras, tasers, gun cameras?) is playing etc etc.

They’re all bundling products and merging and acquiring, same as Facebook and Google before them. A good analysis from the Electronic Freedom Foundation:

One of the most alarming trends in policing is that companies are regularly pushing police to buy more than they need. Vendors regularly pressure police departments to lock in the price now for a whole bundle of features and tools in the name of “cost savings,” often claiming that the cost à la carte for any of these tools will be higher than the cost of a package, which they warn will also be priced more expensively in the future. Market analysts have touted the benefits of creating “moats” between these surveillance ecosystems and any possible competitors. By making it harder to switch service providers due to integrated features, these companies can lock their cop customers into multi-year subscriptions and long-term dependence.

This is exactly what happened with ShotSpotter Connect in Worcester. The “crime forecasting” tool we got for a steal, according to the chief. Axon is working on its own Flock-like database too, using the very same body cameras we just gave the cops. Friendly reminder body cams were always a scam.

The whole thing is a grift, and one that targets the one municipal department that just so happens to never experience anyone telling them “no.”

We saw that play out at the budget hearing Tuesday. We’ll have to save more on that for the essay I have scheduled to run while I’m away next week... that is, if I can finish it tonight... We shall see. Vacation time is not to be interfered with. By the time you’re reading this I’ll be deep in it.

For now, here’s a little taste... three quotes from sitting city councilors, two of them, Toomey and Bergman, on the subcommittee that’s supposed to oversee the police:

Bergman: So through the chair to the chief, would it be fair to say that (ShotSpotter) helps you prevent and not only prevent crime, serious crime, but also apprehend serious criminals with the help of that program? (Chief, of course, says yes that’s correct)
Mero-Carlson: That's a neighborhood who continually talks about how happy they are that they have, they finally got shot spotter. So I just, you know, need to say that because I know oftentimes people talk about ShotSpotter and it's, you know, all these different things, but I think that they need to go and spend a little bit of time in these neighborhoods to know what ShotSpotter means to a lot of the folks who live in these neighborhoods.
Kate Toomey: There are companies that do similar things, but they don't do the depth and breadth of the programs that ShotSpotter has done. And they don't have the reputation that ShotSpotter has, especially, as the chief said, they're not only here in Massachusetts, they’re in New England, the United States, they're all over the country.

All of these comments amount to doing a commercial for ShotSpotter so as to own the progressives critical of it. They don’t even know what they mean, besides that their position is firm: cops get what they want, no matter what it is or what it does. Anyone who suggests otherwise is the enemy. They’re completely captured by negative polarization. The tech companies rely on this dynamic in city after city after city... Sheesh.

No odds and ends this week, just another humble request for some dough!!

Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Merch Store

And don’t forget about that Bad Brains presale in the merch store!

And lastly a fantastic Vacation Style Song.

I’ll be back next Sunday. Until then: peace see ya later.

Oh One Six Oh I Forget

Jun 2

Q recently criticized Mr. Webb with a similar takedown... mealy-mouthed, ineffective noisemaker or something along those lines. Has Q met Q? Maybe it's not a criticism as I thought, maybe it's just Q letting us all know that he misses being a relevant noisemaker.

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Knock Over City

Socialist Noisemaker Bill Shaner

Worcester Sucks and I Love It

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