By Elaine Magliaro
Here’s a photograph of Chicago Police Department officers Jerome Finnigan (left) and Timothy McDermott (right) posing with an unidentified suspect. (Note: The photo was obtained by The Chicago Sun-Times from a court filing.)
The Chicago Police Department didn’t want the public to see this “racially charged” photograph. A Cook County judge, however, refused to keep “the shocking image” of two former police officers “with what the police department says is an unidentified African-American drug suspect” a secret.
The Polaroid photograph was believed “to have been taken in a West Side police station between 1999 and 2003. It was “given to the city by the feds in 2013 and resulted in McDermott, a clout-heavy cop, being fired last year by the police board in a 5-to-4 vote.” The four dissenters felt that Officer McDermott should only have been suspended. According to the Sun-Times, the majority of the board wrote that “appearing to treat an African-American man not as a human being but as a hunted animal is disgraceful and shocks the conscience.”
Click on the link to read the Sun-Times article: CPD cops posed for photo standing over black man dressed in antlers.
SOURCES
CPD cops posed for photo standing over black man dressed in antlers (Chicago Sun-Times)
Court Releases Photo Of Chicago Cops Posing With Black Suspect Like A Hunting Trophy (Huffington Post)
Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
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Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
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Terry Welshans
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Flowers For Socrates 
Disgusting photo. The vote to fire these guys should have been unanimous.
I was kinda wondering that myself, raff.
Even if you discount that the “perp” was black (which we shouldn’t), he is (presumably) a citizen. I’m pretty sure that police “hunting” civilians of any color is wrong on a lot of levels. Unless the Ghost of Augusto Pinochet is running the PD, then it would just be SOP.
Poor Paula!
if the “deer” were white, would we even be reading about it?
Gene’s comment is on point though but is this racist or police brutality or just 3 guys letting off some steam?
What if the two “hunters” were white college coeds and the “deer” was a white frat boy draped over the hood of a car, would we even care? I would think it quite funny in that context.
My guess is the cops were thinking about bagging perps, they probably have similar pictures with white and Hispanic perps. I am also guessing the perps get something for doing it, a pack of smokes, a pizza, etc.
Bron,
So let me get this straight……You who are such a defender of individual freedom feel that the cops doing this were just “blowing off steam”? I guess that for you individual freedom is limited to the effect on your pocketbook and not on any moral principle. I thought you were better than that.
“What if the two “hunters” were white college coeds and the “deer” was a white frat boy draped over the hood of a car, would we even care?”
This is what is known as a false analogy. You compare college coeds with police officers paid to serve and protect the community? How does that even make an iota of sense?
Raff and Gene,
I agree. There should have been no dissenting votes from firing the police perps. Behaving like this with a defendant of any ethnicity is inexcusable. Arresting someone does not give cops the right to demean them and under our law defendants are innocent until PROVEN guilty. Of course we know that for many policeman and many prosecutors that train has left the station.
It is fascinating to me how far people will go to counter any claim of possible racism! Outside of any historical context where blacks are the lesser and subjected to all kinds of mistreatment by the “authority”, there is no racism to this picture.
Considering the context that defines this society however, this picture is racist until proven otherwise.
Bron,
What if…??? We’ll just all pretend we never saw your post and move on.
Po,
Is it true that you are not a person of color, but merely a Muslim outside agitator trying to destroy America’s freedoms by imagining that there is any prejudice in American society? 🙂
Gee, wear these antlers and get on the floor so we can take a picture. Never mind that we’re carrying rifles and if we see you on the street we’ll be armed with handguns, and maybe, from a rooftop, with a rifle with a scope like this one.
Bron,
Much of humor is purely contextual. Hence the old saw “timing is everything” in relation to humor.
Take for example the following scene from “Caddyshack”:
It’s really funny in the context of insulting the blowhard Judge Smales played by Ted Baxter and set in a golf pro shop, a sport notorious for its fashion crimes.
Now transplant that scene to a different locale and circumstance. At a funeral, that joke could go either way: funny or grossly inappropriate. At a crime scene, same thing, it all depends on who is wearing the ugly hat: the victim, the perp or another cop. These alternate scenarios also depend who is telling the joke as much as who is the butt of the joke.
As Alan Watts noted, “Everything is connected to everything else.” Context is critical for most things, not just humor. Information without context is data. Information with context is understanding.
We’ll just all pretend we never saw your post and move on. – po
Story of Bron’s life