Disgraceful Racist US Cops Abuse Black Man

Local Editor

Mayor Rahm Emanuel sought to distance the Chicago Police Department from two ex-Chicago police officers who posed more than a decade ago for a racially-charged photo with an African-American man lying on his stomach with deer antlers on his head.

The photo, which was believed to have been taken between 1999 and 2003 at a Chicago police station, was published in the Chicago Sun-Times this week after a Cook County judge declined to keep the photo out of the public eye.

"Let me be clear: That photo does not represent the values of the city of Chicago that we all share in common," Emanuel stated. "It doesn't represent the values of the Police Department."

In the photo, officers Timothy McDermott and Jerome Finnigan, were armed with rifles and kneel over an unidentified African-American drug suspect who they allegedly splayed to look like hunters' bounty. Both former officers are white and the suspect is black.

"Appearing to treat an African-American man not as a human being but as a hunted animal is disgraceful and shocks the conscience," a Chicago police department review board said.

Earlier this month, the city council approved an unprecedented reparations package to the mostly African-American victims who were tortured by police officers under the control of former police commander Jon Burge.

Nonetheless, from 1972 through 1991, the suspects were subjected by Burge's police officers to mock executions and electric shock and beaten with telephone books as their interrogators flung racial epithets at them. A Chicago Police Department review board ruled in 1993 that Burge's officers had used torture. He was fired.

Furthermore, the officers in the antler photo were part of a disgraced special unit that was accused of robbing drug dealers and other individuals of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Finnigan is serving a 12-year prison sentence for robbery and home invasion after pleading guilty in 2011. However, McDermott was not charged with any criminal wrongdoing, but was fired from the police department last year based on the photo.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team