The mentality of some cops and how they think of Blacks

1st June 2015   ·   0 Comments

By Frederick H. Lowe
Contributing Writer

(Special from NorthStar News Today) — A Cook County, Ill., judge has released a photo of two Chicago cops kneeling next to a Black man with deer antlers affixed to his head as though they had shot and bagged a wild animal.

The unidentified Black man’s tongue is hanging out as he pretends to be dead. His eyes have rolled to the back of his head.

The cops are identified as Jerome Finnigan and Timothy McDermott. Both cops are holding rifles as though they successfully completed a big game hunt. The cops claimed they arrested the Black man because he was a drug suspect. He was later released.

Finnigan, who is smiling, is holding the antlers’ as he rested a shotgun on his thigh. McDermott is staring blankly into the camera, holding the man’s chin.

Judge Thomas Allen ordered the release of the photo, which he unsealed in March. The Chicago Sun-Times obtained the photo and published a story. An unidentified police officer took the photo inside a West Side precinct station between 1999 and 2003. Federal officials gave the photo to city officials in 2013, resulting in Mc­Dermott’s firing last year.

Two years before the photo was given to Chicago police investigators, Finnigan was sentenced to 12 years in prison for leading a crew of cops who committed a series of robberies, home invasions and other crimes, The Sun-Times reported.

“The photo is disgusting, and the despicable actions of these two former officers have no place in our police department or in our society,” Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said in a statement. “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.”

McDermott is trying to get back his job.

The Chicago Police Board fired McDermott, but just barely, by a vote of 5 to 4. The members who voted against McDermott being fired said he should have been suspended.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said he plans to shake up the board, starting with Demetrius Carney, its president. Carney’s term expired last year.

“Let me be clear: That photo does not represent the values of the city of Chicago that we all share in common,” Emanuel told reporters. “It doesn’t represent the values of the Police Department.”

The release of the photo follows Chicago agreeing to pay $5.5 million to African-American men tortured into confessing to crimes they did not commit by disgraced former police commander Jon Burge and his violent cohorts.

Throughout the country, police in various states have killed unarmed Black men. The cops — all of them duly armed — claimed they killed the Black men because they feared for their lives.

This article originally published in the June 1, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.