The photograph, first published late Tuesday night, depicts two white police officers posing with rifles kneeling over a black man on his stomach wearing deer antlers. One of the officers is grinning, and the other has a hand around the man’s throat.
Chicago Police Officers Jerome Finnigan, left, and Timothy McDermott, right, with an unidentified man.
Attorneys for the Chicago police asked Cook County’s Judge Thomas Allen to keep the photo under seal, in order to protect the privacy of the man with the antlers above his head; his identity remains a mystery, at least for now. Allen denied the request in March, and after the newspaper deliberated extensively over whether or not to publish the photo, it’s now being widely shared with the public for the first time.
Unlike the man whom police claim was a criminal suspect, the officers in the photo, which is believed to have been taken between 1999 and 2003, have long been identified.
Former Officer Jerome Finnigan is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence. He was once the leader of Chicago’s notorious Special Operations Section, members of which were found guilty in 2011 of numerous civil rights violations, including the theft of up to $600,000.
Detective Timothy McDermott, who was also assigned to the unit around the time the photograph was taken but not implicated in its criminal activities, was fired last year by a disciplinary board in a 5-4 vote related to the photograph above. He’s since appealed the decision.
During an interview with an internal affairs officer, McDermott reportedly claimed that he couldn’t remember when the photo was taken or anything about the man with the antlers.
“I do remember an incident where I took a photo with Finnigan, and it appears that this is it,” McDermott said. “Finnigan called me over, told me to get in the picture, and I sat in the picture. The photo was taken, and I went back to the business I was doing that day.”
It’s unknown whether the man with the antlers was forced to take part in the photograph or if he did so willingly. Neither the police nor the journalists who’ve investigated the event have turned up any clues. It’s possible further details will be revealed after the image is shared across the Web.
“The fact that a police officer who was involved in the incident now wants his job back is reason enough to run the photograph,” Jim Kirk
, wrote in a separate article about why his paper decided to publish the photo. “... For us to hold the photo back would have been no more defensible than the police holding it back.”
“This photograph will offend people, as it offends us,” Kirk continued. “We also know it can be a tool to raise the level of constructive discourse to make our city better. In the end, that’s what the residents of this great city and this newspaper all want.”
The photo is problematic, to put it lightly and Chicago Police Department reportedly wasn’t too keen on the public seeing it, however a Cook County judge refused to keep the photo sealed.
The image in question shows two white officers--Jerome Finnigan and Timothy McDermott--in plain clothes holding hunting rifles posing with a black suspect who is lying on his stomach, his tongue stuck out and his eyes rolled upwards with deer antlers on his head.
According to the Sun-Times, the photo is believed to have been taken in a West Side police station sometime between 1999 and 2003. Federal prosecutors turned the photo over to the city in 2013, which ultimately resulted in McDermott being fired in 2014 on a police board vote of 5-4. Majority voters declared that “appearing to treat an African-American man not as a human being but as a hunted animal is disgraceful and shocks the conscience.”
McDermott is appealing his termination, according to the news site. McDermott’s lawyer as well as lawyers for the police department had requested that the photo be kept sealed, claiming to want to protect the privacy of the unidentified suspect. However, Judge Thomas Allen refused.
The report notes that the photo first surfaced after federal prosecutors turned over the photo in 2013. Two years before, Finnigan was sentenced to 12 year for leading rouge cops in robberies, home invasions and other crimes, the Sun-Times reports.
Police Supt. Garry McCarthy, who moved to have McDermott fired, slammed the photo as “disgusting.
“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,” McCarthy said in a blistering statement to the news site.
“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.”
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