This is the answer key for the Candidate Forum 2025 BINGO game.

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Freedom from Drone Surveillance Act (725 ILCS 167/1)

Answer: Freedom From Drone Surveillance Act

The Evanston Police use drone surveillance on people expressing political speech which is forbidden (725 ILCS 167/5) under Biss's legislation. The flight logs list these surveillance flights as "Pilot routine training flight".


1. What legislation did Daniel Biss create as a senator in 2014 that his own police now violate without consequence?

Stop ALPRs

Answer: ALPRs (Automated License Plate Readers)

In January of 2024 city council rubber stamped approval for the Evanston police to renew their contract for automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras with a private company called Flock Safety. The data from these cameras has no public oversight and collects data 24/7 with no warrant.

Billionaire Peter Thiel helped fund Flock Safety and bankrolled Donald Trump's election campaign after Trump selected Thiel's protege, JD Vance. Years of our data sit in the databases of surveillance capitalists who now have a cozy relationship with with Trump.


2. Every council member voted to expand this technology that funnels our dollars and data into the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires who helped bring Trump to power.

Interview With Hugo Rodriguez on Gentrification

Answer: Gentrification

The “unsafe building” pretext is one that has been repeatedly used across cities to displace lower-income tenants, often paving the way for redevelopment projects that prioritize wealthier residents.

3. What pretext used by Councilmember Bobby Burns was used to justify the displacement of Black and low-income residents under the guise of public safety?

Justice For Wesley

Answer: Wesley

The buildings at 2014, 2018, and 2024 Wesley have acted as an affordable springboard into the community for many. On February 13, 2024 the tenants of the Wesley apartments were called to a meeting with City officials, and were given a handout stating that the buildings had been deemed unsafe by the city, and that the tenants would have to move out. They continue to live with housing precarity since.

4. The street where a community of Black elders were forcibly removed from their homes in 2024

Housing beyond land rent? A critique of market housing solutionism

Answer: YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard)

This is a neoliberal (capitalist-based) trickle-down approach to housing that prioritizes profit over people. Daniel Biss and Connections for the Homeless are cringey proponents for YIMBYism which rots communities.

5. What pro-developer housing ideology, supported by Mayor Daniel Biss, is used to justify upzoning and market-based solutions in Evanston?

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded

Answer: Non-Profit Industrial Complex 

"The NPIC functions as an alibi that allows government
to make war, expand punishment, and proliferate market economies under the
veil of partnership between the public and private sectors."

Excerpt From
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence

6. What system in Evanston monopolizes funding while maintaining the status quo?

The Real Estate Industry Is Successfully Lobbying Local Media to Ditch...

Answer: "Housing Providers"

"As with housing crisis, here too we need to reconceptualize: Landlords don’t provide housing, they extract rent from housing. Developers don’t provide housing, they speculate on housing."

7. What term does Evanston use to make landlords sound more benevolent by obscuring their feudal role?

Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can Solve the Housing Crisis

Answer: Tenants

Tenant as defined in the book Abolish Rent:

“Rather than renter, we use the expansive term tenant. The concept harkens back to landlords’ feudal title, which makes their power clear. It also refuses the dehumanizing division that ejects unhoused people from our analyses as soon as they are pushed from their homes. A tenant is more than a renter. A tenant is anyone who doesn’t control their housing, who inhabits but doesn’t own. Like the word tent, the origin of the word tenant is from the Latin tenere, which means “to hold” or “to have.” Tenants hold space but are vulnerable to having it taken away.”

Excerpt From
Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can Solve the Housing Crisis, Tracy Rosenthal & Leonardo Vilchis

8. What group in Evanston includes renters, house debtors, and the unhoused?

Evanston Ceasefire

Answer: Ceasefire

No matter who you vote for, no matter how many, they will make good on their oath to empire over people. Even in genocide, especially in genocide.

9. What issue did many Evanston councilmembers privately support but refused to bring to council for fear of lack of votes?

Location Data Broker Admits Users Accessed Data for Planned Parenthood...

Answer: Placer.ai

According to Councilmember Reid, 'everything is tracked nowadays anyway' which excuses their contract with data brokers to track people in Evanston. Creepy stuff; we deserve better than careless complacency. 

10. What data broker is Evanston paying to track people’s movements through their mobile devices?

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