Chicago Police Supervisor Steps Down After Probe Into His Racist Facebook Posts
A high-ranking Chicago police officer retired on Oct. 15 amid controversy over racist Facebook posts that disparaged a number of communities, despite his claim the account was hacked.
The Chicago Sun Times reports that Lt. John Cannon stepped down almost a year after the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) recommended his termination after their probe found he violated police department policies.
“Lt. Cannon’s posts disparage the same protected classes he took an oath to protect and serve, including Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, the LGBTQ community, and women,” COPA’s report stated, according to the Sun Times. “Through his use of social media, Lt. Cannon has demonstrated that he is unable to treat all the citizens of Chicago with fairness and equity,” it said.
COPA found evidence to support 16 of the 19 allegations against Cannon’s social media posts. One post showed an edited picture of former President Barack Obama wearing a hijab, the headcovering many Muslim women wear in public, and the caption read, “Obama is Isis.”
He also commented in another post about the fatal police shooting of Harith Augustus, a Black man, in 2018 that erupted in protests.
“Brave young warriors face to face with an urban terrorist and the better trained professional Police Officer won the day,” he wrote. “Excellent work by all the new batch of warriors. Love it.”
In 2020, Cannon, who used the handle “Samuel Hipster'' on Facebook, filed a complaint against the former dean of the University of Illinois School of Law where he was enrolled. Cannon argued that school administrators discriminated against white people and cops in their emails about the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 by convicted former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin.
After that, Cannon filed a lawsuit alleging that a fellow student at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law sent an email on behalf of a lawyers group that called for the removal of Chicago cops from the campus. Cannon also alleged that the student “hacked” his Facebook account and was behind an effort to paint him as a bigot.
Cannon later admitted that he made the inflammatory posts. He failed to “provide any evidence that someone had improperly accessed his account,” COPA stated.
