Former Cop Who Staged Racist Photo Cannot Have Job Back, Court Rules
By Stephen Gossett in News on Jul 12, 2016 6:55PM
Photo: Scott Olson / Getty Images
A former Chicago police officer who was fired in 2014 after a photo surfaced of him and another officer posing with rifles over a black teenager wearing deer antlers cannot return to his job, the Illinois Appellate Court ruled on Friday.
The court affirmed a Police Board decision from October, 2014 to discharge Timothy McDermott from the Chicago Police Department for violation of department rules. A Cook County judge previously upheld the firing, in a 2014 ruling.
Then-Police Supt. Garry McCarthy called the photo "disgusting" and the former officers' actions "despicable" in a statement last year.
.@Chicago_Police didn't want you to see this photo of cops torturing a black man: http://t.co/oCHHTTCIe3 v @kimjnews pic.twitter.com/sxO2kc11dH
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) May 27, 2015
A 2002 police report obtained by the Sun-Times indicated that the man forced to wear antlers was Michael Spann, a West Side teenager who was later killed in a shooting in 2007. The police department originally claimed themselves unable to find details of Spann's arrest. They began investigating the photo in January 2013 after it was forwarded from the FBI.
Spann and his uncle, Robert Smith, then 37, were arrested after Spann allegedly shouted "weed" while walking along the street then dropped a plastic bag of marijuana. Smith denied the report and claimed that police raided his home without a warrant. Spann was released without being charged. The second former officer pictured in the photo, Jerome Finnigan, was dismissed from the police department in 2006 on unrelated corruption charges and sentenced to 12 years in federal prison.
The ruling follows a tumultuous week in America for relations between police and African-Americans. Philando Castile was fatally shot by a police officer in Minnesota and Alton Sterling was killed by police gunshot in Baton Rouge. A Dallas sniper killed five officers and wounded nine more on Thursday. The shootings of Castile and Sterling prompted waves of protests throughout the weekend and beyond. Activists have also called for a civilian-elected police accountability board amid frequent criticisms of the Independent Police Review Authority.