Calumet City police are looking for someone who hung an effigy of a black man swinging from a noose beneath the words "Kill niggers" on a billboard. Police got an anonymous call Wednesday from someone who spotted the offensive words on a billboard on Michigan City Road just west of Burnham Avenue, near the Burnham bike path. Police Chief Patrick O'Meara said the graffiti was removed the same day. On Saturday, however, the epithets were back, and another symbol of racial hatred joined them. Calumet City resident Walter Owens was driving past the billboard when he saw a dummy swung from a noose beneath it. The dummy's skin was painted brown. It was wearing an Afro wig. Owens' wife, Teresa, called the simulated lynching "alarming." "I was horrified," TeresaOwens said. "You might see something like that written on a bus stop, but in huge letters, on a billboard, and the dummy ... This kind of thing can't be tolerated by the community. Someone has to speak out about it." A city that has seen its white majority evaporate in the past decade, Calumet City has struggled with racial tension in recent months. On Friday, the city settled a federal lawsuit with a teenage boy who said police detained him for jaywalking and then brutally beat him. Police filed disciplinary charges of excessive force and conduct unbecoming a police officer against 38-year-old Louis Picicco, who was accused of pinning 15-year-old Don Pennington Jr. by the neck in the Calumet City Police Department's interrogation room and punching Pennington in the face and head. According to the 1990 census, the city's population was 73 percent white. In a decade, more than 8,000 white residents left the city, and nearly 12,000 blacks moved in. The city's population of 39,000 is now 52 percent black. [more] and [more]
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