Stolen Radios

There used to be a number of Officers on CPD who knew tow truck regulations down to the tiniest detail, especially required equipment (shovel, bucket of sand, etc), and they were ruthless in enforcing it to the point that many of these fly-by-night tow operators wouldn't even respond to certain Districts because they were tired of getting locked up.

Might be time to start teaching this stuff again and filtering out these scumbags:

• A private tow truck driver is accused of possessing a stolen high-tech Chicago Police Department radio capable of listening to secured radio transmissions from the city’s police and fire departments.CPD encrypted most of its radio channels beginning in late 2022, a move then-mayor Lori Lightfoot said was necessary to prevent criminals from hearing police activities in real-time.

  Officers patrolling the Humboldt Park neighborhood around 6:15 p.m. on September 15 saw the tow truck heading west on North Avenue without a front plate, with no company identifiers on the vehicle, and with a heavily tinted windshield, a CPD report said.

  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, according to the report. The $2,500 radio operated on the police department’s encrypted radio channels, allowing its users to hear police radio activities in real-time.

Wasn't there a rumor at some point that these "advanced radios" would be able to be turned-off in the event of loss/theft? 

Or is this another one of those cases similar to where CPS buys million of dollars worth of computers, installs track-able software to prevent loss/theft, and then neglects to activate it when $77 million worth of computers goes missing?

In any event, all tow operators ought to be looked at with an eye toward probable cause when they beat responding officers to the scene of any accident.