A Chicago police officer is accused of accepting cash payments in exchange for lending out his department-issued encrypted radio, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul announced Tuesday. Alain M. Dillon, 37, faces multiple counts of bribery and official misconduct.
Dillon took multiple $500 payments from an unidentified person in exchange for personal access to Dillon’s CPD-issued radio, Raoul said, without saying who used the radio or for what purpose.
Dillon has been under investigation since June 2024 and has been working stripped of police powers in an office that takes police reports over the phone.
Encrypted radios are high-tech devices that cannot be heard on publicly available handsets or scanners. CPD encrypted most of its radio channels beginning in late 2022, a move then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot said was necessary to prevent criminals from monitoring police activities in real-time. The city streams encrypted radio channels online with a 30-minute delay.
Parties interested in accessing CPD’s encrypted radios, which cost $2,500 apiece, range from tow truck drivers hoping to arrive first at traffic crash scenes to gang members to news reporters.
In September 2024, officers patrolling the Humboldt Park neighborhood saw a tow truck heading west on North Avenue without a front plate, with no company identifiers on the vehicle, and with a heavily tinted windshield, according to a CPD report.
As they began following the truck, the driver pulled into an alley behind the 3400 block of West Potomac. The officers said they saw the driver get out, put something under a blue garbage bin, and drive away.
Curious, they looked under the bin and discovered a high-tech CPD radio labeled “Property of City of Chicago” and bearing a city inventory number. The officers caught up with the tow truck and pulled it over in the 1300 block of North St. Louis. Its driver, 46-year-old Ismael Claudio Jr., admitted to possessing the radio, according to his arrest report.
Claudio pleaded guilty to misdemeanor theft of lost or mislaid property in January 2025 and successfully completed a conditional discharge program, according to court records.
Before encryption, tow truck drivers commonly used emergency radio scanners to learn about traffic crashes so they could race to the scene and get paid to haul away a vehicle. But scanners cannot decrypt encoded radio transmissions.
Shortly after the city began encrypting police radios, there was a flurry of incidents in which thieves swiped radios from the front desks of Chicago police stations. In one of those cases, a migrant who was living in a CPD station told police that a known gang member offered him $1,000 for a police radio capable of receiving encrypted transmissions.
During his mayoral campaign, Brandon Johnson said he would restore the public’s real-time access to CPD radio activity. He has not done that.
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