Just blowing off some steam. Again.
by digby
A grotesque image recently made public by a Cook County judge shows two former Chicago police officers holding rifles and posing next to an unidentified black man, who is shown wearing fake deer antlers and sticking his tongue out, as if he had been hunted and killed.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Police Department requested that the racially charged photo, which shows former officers Timothy McDermott and Jerome Finnigan standing over the man, remain sealed in court documents. Judge Thomas Allen, however, denied the request in March, after police Supt. Garry McCarthy moved to fire McDermott. He has since been removed from the force, but appealed his dismissal earlier this year.
Via the Sun-Times:
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.” [...]
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.
Remind you of anything?
That's what I immediately thought of. It seems that some people in our allegedly civilized culture like to torture and humiliate people by treating them like animals. How odd.
The Chicago cops described the decision to take their picture as “spur of the moment.” Nobody knows who the man is. The officers say they released him without arresting him because he had no criminal record. Let's hope somebody identifies this man and proves that he was still alive after that incident. It's one very creepy image. Nice of the city (like the federal government with the torture pics) to try to keep it under wraps. For our own good dontcha know. These things tend to inflame the plebes.
I guess we're supposed to believe that this is yet another anomaly. Bad apples. Very rare. nothing to worry about. And the fact that nobody ever turned these guys in is just another coincidence. It's not as if the culture requires that "good cops" cover up for "bad cops" or anything.
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