Finnegan is smiling and grabbing the right antler, while McDermott is holding up the man’s head as if it were his trophy.
The photo was taken in a police station on the West Side of Chicago sometime between 1999 and 2003. The Chicago Police Department successfully kept it hidden from the public until a judge refused to keep it under seal and the Chicago Sun-Times pulled a copy from a court filing.
Finnigan is a notoriously dirty ex-cop who was a member of the police department’s elite Special Operations Section (SOS) until 2006, when he was charged with leading a gang of fellow officers who robbed suspects, illegally invaded homes and stole thousands of dollars in cash. He’s now serving 12 years in federal prison.
In a 2012 interview with Playboy, Finnigan admitted the SOS beat and tortured multiple suspects, and described shutting down an internal affairs investigation by appealing to one of his comrades in blue who worked in the Internal Affairs Division.
The Sun-Times reports that federal authorities gave the photo to Chicago Police in 2013, after Finnigan’s prosecution. As a result, a police board last year voted to fire McDermott — but only by a 5-4 margin.
After the Guardian disclosed this year how Chicago police kept their detention and torture at the Homan Square facility off the books, police told me no suspect is detained without proper paperwork. But it’s not at all surprising to find out that Finnigan and McDermott filed no arrest report the night the photograph was taken.
As for the man in the photo, he has no name. The police claimed he was dealing drugs, but there is no reason to believe them. Ultimately, whether the man was a drug dealer or not is irrelevant.
He was a human being, dehumanized by other men who swore to protect and serve the public good. And if the police, who have a monopoly on sanctioned violence, view a segment of the population as not quite human, then they will do anything to those people.
Against this backdrop, the deer photo — so reminiscent of the “trophy” pictures taken by the torturers at Abu Ghraib — has a direct relationship to the way police treat black communities.
The anti-black sickness that infects America’s police departments will not be solved by body cameras or any other ornament of reform. A more profound, national rejection is called for.
Link to original article from The Intercept
Imagine going to the polls on Election Day and discovering that your ballot could be collected and reviewed by the
ACLU Blueprints Offer Vision to Cut US Incarceration Rate in Half by Prioritizing 'People Over Prisons' 
"These disasters drag into the light exactly who is already being thrown away," notes Naomi Klein 
How about some good news? Kansas Democratic Representative advances bill for Native Peoples. 
What mattered was that he showed up — that he put himself in front of the people whose opinions on
On a night of Democratic victories, one of the most significant wins came in Virginia, where the party held onto
A seismic political battle that could send shockwaves all the way to the White House was launched last week in
In an interview with Reuters conducted a month after he took office, Donald Trump asserted that the U.S. had “fallen
Attorney General Jeff Sessions overturned the sweeping criminal charging policy of former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. and directed
The news that the White House and Republican congressional leaders have given up on passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is
If you read the headlines, Donald Trump’s election has killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The headlines have it wrong. 
Democratic senator from Massachusetts offers fresh criticism of trade deal in new video 
Today’s World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling against the U.S. country-of-origin meat labels (COOL) that consumers rely on to make informed
Negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade agreement between 12 nations—ended earlier this week. The likely passage of the agreement means
'For thousands of women to die unnecessary of breast cancer because of the TPP is a horrible, cruel, premeditated, and
A razor-thin Senate vote Tuesday put President Obama on the cusp of claiming victory for his ambitious international trade agenda,
The Fast Track trade authority package was rejected Friday because two years of effort by a vast corporate coalition, the
It just doesn't get more cynical than this. Note that we're talking about a bipartisan trade deal, thanks to 14