Photo Emerges Showing Chicago Cops Depicting Black Man as Hunting Trophy

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A Cook County judge has released a photo of two Chicago cops holding rifles and kneeling next to a black suspect, who is lying on the ground with deer antlers on his head, after the Chicago Police Department (CPD) fought to keep the image under wraps.

Likely taken between 1999 and 2003, the Polaroid photo shows former officers Jerome Finnigan and Timothy McDermott posing with the suspect, depicting him as a hunting trophy. The city of Chicago was first made aware of the image in 2013, after federal officials handed it over in a move that led to McDermott's firing.

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Despite the police board's decision to remove McDermott from his position, the CPD asked that the photo not be made public due to privacy concerns about the suspect, who has not been identified. This request was ultimately rejected by Judge Thomas Allen in March, and published for the first time on Tuesday by the Chicago Sun-Times after the newspaper said it obtained a copy from the court file.

The photo appears to have been taken during McDermott and Finnigan's tenure with the department's Special Operations Section (SOS), but no arrest report was ever filed for the suspect. Finnigan said the man had no prior arrests, and that the photo was shot in a police building. McDermott has said he does not recall details of the photo, but claimed the man had "20 bags of weed."

"I do remember an incident where I took a photo with Finnigan and it appears that this is it," McDermott said during a 2013 internal affairs interview. "Finnigan called me over, told me to get in the picture and I sat in the picture. The photo was taken, and I went back to the business I was doing that day."

McDermott also said he was embarrassed by his participation in the photograph, calling it a mistake made by a "young, impressionable" police officer trying to fit in.

Superintendent Garry McCarthy, who pushed both for McDermott's firing and to seal the photo, told the Sun-Times the photo is "disgusting" and that the officers' actions have "no place" in the department.

Finnigan was ousted from the department prior to the photo coming to light. The veteran cop is currently serving a 12-year federal prison sentence on charges in connection with his involvement in a group of SOS cops who orchestrated home break-ins and robberies in the city.