It’s a racially charged photograph.
In it, two former Chicago cops, both of them white, pose as if on a hunting trip. They’re down on one knee holding rifles. A black man is lying on the floor between them with antlers on his head.
The message is clear: The officers are the hunters. The man is their prey.
Cook County Judge Thomas Allen released the Polaroid this week over the objections of the Chicago Police Department and Tim McDermott, one of the former officers in it. They said they wanted to protect the identity of the African-American man in it.
The CPD fired McDermott in October, but he wants his job back. A court hearing on the matter is scheduled for next month.
“As far as I’m concerned for that officer, good riddance. You don’t belong in the Police Department,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel told CNN affiliate WLS. “Our whole idea of a police department is to serve and protect, and the values expressed in that photo are not the values of the people of the city of Chicago.”
It’s not a new picture, and the details surrounding it are sketchy. It was taken sometime between 1999 and 2003 and was uncovered during an FBI investigation of the other officer in the photo, Jerome Finnigan.
Finnigan was convicted of shaking down drug dealers with other cops and stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from them, WLS reported. He was also convicted of plotting to kill another officer.
In a transcript from an internal affairs investigation, McDermott says he only “very, very vaguely” remembers posing for the picture.
“I remember walking through (the police station) and someone saying ‘Hey, Timmie, take a picture,’ ” the transcript says, according to WLS.
The photo doesn’t play well on the backdrop of a nationwide string of incidents pitting white officers against black suspects, with many of the confrontations deadly.
“That was very disgusting and disheartening, to watch officers of the law participate in something like that,” William Calloway with Black Lives Matter told WLS. “I think this is something that’s going inside the Chicago Police Department.”