It’s the picture the Chicago Police Department doesn’t want the public to see. The image is of two Chicago Police officers posing with rifles over an unidentified suspect as though he was hunted. Nearly all who have seen the image have noted the obvious racial tone of the image. Few, even within the department, have tried to deny that the image of and the scenario is racially charged.
Who the man in the photo is remains a mystery, but sources within the department say that he was a “drug suspect” who the Chicago cops forced to pose this way, with deer antlers on his head, and lying on his stomach as though he had been shot by the officers who “hunted” him.
Try as they might, the Chicago Police Department was unable to keep a Cook County judge from hiding their secret image.
The officers in the picture have been identified as Timothy McDermott and Jerome Finniga.
The picture is said to have been taken in a West Side police station somewhere between the years of 1999 and 2003. That’s how long the CPD has managed to cover this up.
This is, of course, only one image that has come to light – representing one incident. Are we really to believe that these officers never did anything of the sort before or after taking this picture? What about the officer who snapped the Polaroid photo?
All of this took place in a department where the climate was conducive to this sort of thing.
The Polaroid was given to the city by federal investigators back in 2013. That investigation resulted in McDermott being fired last year. But his termination was a narrow decision, as a board voted only 5-4 to get rid of him.
There were four dissenters who only wanted him to face paid administrative leave or suspension.
The five who voted for his termination did not hesitate to call the image racist, saying it “appear[ed] to treat an African-American man not as a human being but as a hunted animal is disgraceful and shocks the conscience.”
The Chicago Police Department was asked to comment on why they wanted the image concealed from public sight. Never unwilling to insult our intelligence, the Chicago PD said “they wanted to protect the privacy” of the unidentified African-American man.
Judge Allen denied their request in March, but the image is only now coming out, according to The Chicago Sun-Times, which obtained the image via court files.
McCarthy released a statement, saying that the photo “is 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.”
The feds say that the African-American man in the image was arrested for having “20 bags of weed.”
Apparently, in exchange for the marijuana and posing for the photo, the officers let the man go free, as Finnigan and McDermott did not file an arrest report, according to court records.
What do you think the police department wanted this image covered up for?
(Article by M. David)