An on-duty Chicago police officer made “an offensive racial remark” about President Obama in front of other officers during a presidential visit to the city, an independent review board says; the Chicago Sun-Times and Washington Post both report that the offensive remark involved using “the n-word” (“nigger”) to refer to the president.
The review board recommended that the officer, whose identity has not been disclosed, be fired; Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson has not yet made a decision in the case.
The comment was made at a police station in the city’s Little Italy neighborhood “when Obama was in town last October to attend a Chicago Bulls game and the officers were figuring out who would work on his detail,” the Sun-Times says.
The Chicago Police Department has been involved in an egregious number of race-related scandals in recent years, from the cover-up of Laquan McDonald’s needless shooting death to the cover-up of Darius Pinex’s needless shooting death to allegations of widespread civil rights violations at the Homan Square interrogation site to the revelation of a photo of white officers with a black suspect who is posed to look like an animal they’ve just shot.
