Is Racist Cop Photo of a Black Man Wearing Antlers a Relic of the Past?

Former Chicago tactical officers Jerome Finnegan (left) and Timothy McDermott (right) in a court photo with unidentified man first published by the Chicago Sun-Times.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is promising to shake up the independent, civilian board charged with overseeing certain activities of the Chicago Police Department, including investigating matters of police conduct.

At a Taste of Chicago preview on Wednesday, Emanuel bid “good riddance” to a former Chicago police officer fired last year for his role in an inflammatory photo published by the Sun-Times earlier this week.

Fired cop Timothy McDermott and another former police colleague, now imprisoned, are posed kneeling with rifles over an African-American man wearing deer antlers in a Polaroid believed taken between 1999 and 2003.

“Let me be clear: That photo does not represent the values of the city of Chicago that we all share in common. It doesn’t represent the values of the Police Department,” Emanuel told news media. “And as the mayor of the city of Chicago to that individual, ’Good riddance. ... You don’t belong in the Police Department.’ Our whole idea of the Police Department is to serve and protect.”

The mayor also promised to shake up the Chicago Police Board, beginning by dumping Board President Demetrius Carney, whose term expired last year, the Sun-Times reported.

Since 2013, when the picture first surfaced, the Chicago Police Department tried to keep it under wraps, expressing concern for the unidentified black man, whom police said was a drug suspect. A Cook County judge ordered the photo to be released earlier this year.

McDermott told investigators from internal police affairs that he was ashamed of his participation in the disgusting photo, taken at the Harrison District Police Station when he was part of a now-disbanded tactical special operations detail.

By then, the other participant in the photo, Jerome Finnegan, was serving time in prison for his role in leading a crew of rogue cops in burglaries, home invasions and other crimes.

In a hearing before the police board last October, McDermott received a glowing tribute from his stepfather, former Deputy Superintendent Thomas Byrne, before Byrne went on to become commissioner of the streets and sanitation department under former Mayor Richard M. Daley.

McDermott was fired anyway in a 5-to-4 vote. The dissenters believed that McDermott should have been suspended based on past cases of other Chicago police officers caught in compromising photos.

A police board majority, however, wrote in its ruling that “appearing to treat an African-American man not as a human being but as a hunted animal is disgraceful and shocks the conscience,” according to records obtained by the Sun-Times.

McDermott is appealing his dismissal in court.

Chicago has also taken steps to further remove “the stain” from its police department by becoming the first city in the nation to pay reparations — $5.5 million — to the alleged torture victims of former police commander Jon Burge and his cohorts.

Along the North Side lakefront, where police officers reflect the neighborhoods’ melting pot of black, white, Asian, Native American, Latino and LGBT residents, one questions if Chicago is doing enough to restore trust between police and residents?

Is the photo of two white cops humiliating a black man by portraying him as a hunted animal truly a relic of an old school past? A photograph so old that it’s a Polaroid taken long before “selfies” and social media?

Or are cops, like everyone else, just being more careful?