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The news comes
amid a national outcry against police treatment of minority
groups, and African-Americans in particular, following several
high-profile police killings of unarmed black men in cities like
Ferguson, Missouri and New York over the past year.
The Chicago Police Board terminated the employment of former
Detective Timothy McDermott over the photo in October, the
newspaper said.
McDermott has filed a lawsuit to regain his job, and the Tribune
said a judge blocked his and his attorneys' requests to have the
photo kept under seal.
McDermott was joined in the picture by Officer Jerome Finnigan,
who was sentenced to 12 years in prison for home invasions and
robberies as part of a disgraced police task force and for
"ordering a hit" on another officer he believed to be helping
investigators probe the corruption, the newspaper said.
The identity of the black man and how he came to be in the
photograph were not immediately known.
McDermott described participating in the photo as a mistake to
police internal affairs in 2013, the paper said.
"I made a mistake as a young impressionable police officer who
was trying to fit in," McDermott said, according to the Tribune.
The police board said in its charges against McDermott that the
photo was snapped sometime between October 1999 and July 2003,
according to the newspaper.
(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Toby
Chopra)
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