The Chicago Police Department tried to hide this photo in which former Officers Timothy McDermott and Jerome Finnigan hold rifles while posing with an unidentified black suspect wearing antlers. A Cook County judge declined to seal the appalling photo, and the Chicago Sun Times has published it for the first time.
Federal prosecutors gave the photo, believed to be taken between 1999 and 2003, to the Chicago Police Department in 2013. As a result McDermott (right) was fired by the police board in a narrow 5-4 vote. Finnigan had already left the department, as he was sentenced two years prior to 12 years in jail for leading a crew of crooked cops in a string of robberies and home invasions.
The majority of the police board wrote, "Appearing to treat an African-American man not as a human being but as a hunted animal is disgraceful and shocks the conscience." The photo's release follows a string of police killings of black men that have also shown a racist disregard and shocked the conscience.
Finnigan told federal investigators the man in the photo was a suspect detained for having "20 bags of weed." He didn't arrest the man, however, because he didn't have a serious criminal background. As for the photo, Finnigan said it was taken in "the spur of the moment."
Police Supt. Garry McCarthy issued a statement, calling the photo:
...disgusting, and the despicable actions of these two former officers have no place in our police department or in our society. As the superintendent of this department, and as a resident of our city, I will not tolerate this kind of behavior, and that is why neither of these officers works for CPD today. I fired one of the officers and would have fired the other if he hadn’t already been fired by the time I found out about the picture. Our residents deserve better than this, as do the thousands of good men and women in this department.
