Fired Buffalo police officer finds new support from Chicago artists

CHICAGO — The arts collective at the Inner-City Muslim Action Network on Chicago’s Southwest Side supports artists from across the country, encouraging them to inspire change through storytelling.

But the details of Cariol Horne’s story, shared there during a summer of intense national conversation over police abuse, struck an unusually troubling note — Horne has maintained for 15 years that she was fired from the Buffalo Police Department because she broke ranks and saved a man who was being choked by another cop during an arrest.

Her dismissal, when she was just shy of 20 years on the job, cost Horne a full pension.

Now the dramatic story has become part of an unusual musical collaboration between IMAN founder Rami Nashashibi and a Buffalo music artist who wrote a nine-track album, a reflection on race and social justice that calls for spiritual healing and radical changes, such as a law Horne helped pen that makes it mandatory for officers to intervene and stop police abuse.

But Horne’s story has not only been elevated in the music.

At the request of IMAN, powerhouse Chicago law firm Kirkland & Ellis agreed to review her firing and this month launched a court battle to get Horne’s job back, a surprising new legal development in her long-standing effort to fight the decision that ended her career.

A legal team that includes a former White House chief legal counsel to President Barack Obama filed a motion in New York state court seeking to vacate Horne’s firing, arguing it was “in the interest of justice” to do so.