Can Chicago Turn Its Latest Police Tragedy Into a Triumph Over Violent Crimes?
You would need a heart of granite to remain unmoved by the loss of Chicago police Officer Ella French.
The 29-year-old, on the force for three years, was fatally shot last weekend in an incident that also left her partner, whose identity was withheld, critically wounded.
Some Chicago officers told the world what they thought of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s leadership by turning their backs on her in unison, according to witnesses, when she arrived to visit the wounded officer at the University of Chicago Medical Center late Saturday.
She must have expected that. It was the sort of peaceful but defiant protest New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio faced during his eulogy for slain officers in his city in 2017 and 2014.
But while some police officers were at the hospital with other friends and family of their wounded comrade, about a hundred neighborhood residents gathered with officers from the community safety team to which French was assigned to release balloons in the South Side neighborhood of West Englewood where the tragedy took place.
Lightfoot tried to calm troubled waters by releasing a statement of sorrow and calls for unity. “We have a common enemy,” she said, “and it is the conditions that breed the violence and the manifestations of violence, namely illegal guns and gangs.”
So true. Unfortunately in this era of understandable anger over police abuses following George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, unity against a common foe and the quest for effective remedies too often gets lost in a fog of anger, resentments and suspicions that pull us further apart.
Lightfoot knows. The first-term mayor and former prosecutor now dances on a tightrope between her department’s morale and the push for police accountability over scandals that began long before her term or the incendiary police murder of Floyd.
Against that backdrop, French’s death sounded all the more tragic in tributes that described her as a police reformer’s dream. Talking to a Tribune reporter, her brother, Andrew French, an Iraq War veteran, described her as “humanitarian,” a “proponent of therapy or social services over more jail time,” and an officer who “wanted to see people get the help they needed.”
But some officers also described her as a victim of lopsided politics and priorities, as they see themselves.
...continued
(c) 2021 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
