cops posed for photo standing over black man dressed in antlers

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It’s a racially charged photo the Chicago Police Department didn’t want the public to see: two white cops posing with rifles as they stand over a black man lying on his belly with deer antlers on his head.


But a Cook County judge has refused to keep secret the shocking image of former Officers Timothy McDermott and Jerome Finnigan kneeling with what the police department says is an unidentified African-American drug suspect.

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Believed to have been taken in a West Side police station between 1999 and 2003, the Polaroid photo 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 said McDermott should only have been suspended. But a 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.”

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Even though police Supt. Garry McCarthy moved to fire McDermott, attorneys for the police department and McDermott both asked Judge Thomas Allen to keep the photo under seal earlier this year.

They said they wanted to protect the privacy of the unidentified African-American man. Allen denied their request in March. The Sun-Times recently obtained a copy of the photo in the court file.

Federal prosecutors gave the photo to police investigators in 2013 about two years after Finnigan — the notorious other cop in the picture — was sentenced to 12 years in prison for leading a crew of rogue cops in robberies, home invasions and other crimes.



The photo comes to light as conflicts in recent months between white police officers and black suspects have gained national attention and sparked national protests, and as McCarthy himself has started a listening tour throughout Chicago to improve the frayed relations between police and the black and Hispanic communities.

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