Ella French, a 29-year-old Chicago police officer, was killed Saturday night in the line of duty in the West Englewood neighborhood on the South Side. “God took the wrong kid,” her older brother, Andrew French, told the Tribune on Sunday.
French, an Iraqi War veteran who clearly had seen human brutality up close, was anxious that people knew his little sister was a police officer who believed in reform, who cared about social justice, who wanted and intended to be a force for good.
Someone with a kind heart who was more interested in getting the citizens of Chicago the help they needed than sending them to jail. A young woman with ideals and compassion. The kind of police officer who was trying to effect change. A beacon of a brighter future for Chicago policing.
Whatever Ella’s murderous assailants were trying to achieve, he was saying, they had the wrong target. In fact, they had killed someone on their own side. She was part of the solution, really, not a manifestation of the problem.
He was also saying, in essence, “she was much better than me,” which is a former soldier’s way of communicating, “I loved her that much.”
There is something especially shocking about the death of a police officer (a second officer shot during the fatal traffic stop was clinging to life Monday). It is a reminder that every time an officer approaches a car, they have to worry that the occupants may be armed and dangerous with police officers in their sights. For anyone who has questioned the legitimacy of that concern, and some have, the hard evidence presented Saturday night bespeaks otherwise.
Chicago police officers know that the likelihood is they won’t be seen as Ella French, or any other individual, but merely as a symbol, an object, a dehumanized target. They know that somebody with a gun won’t be sizing up how they have conducted themselves, whether they are kind or cruel, or where they stand on the controversial policing issues of the day. They’ll just see a uniform. That’s all.
At a news conference Sunday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot felt the need to remind the city that police officers are made of flesh and blood. It is a sad fact of this Chicago moment that such an admonition was necessary.
“The police are not our enemies,” she said in one of her most eloquent statements since she took office. “They are human just as we are. Flawed, just as we are, but also risking their lives every day for our safety and security.”
This is an incontrovertible truth. Unless it is understood and imbued, both meaningful police reform and greater public safety will be impossible to achieve.
One side has to accept the existence of its flaws, most of which are as systemic as they are personal, and work on improvement, aware of how trauma can manifest as violence and rededicated to the eradication of both.
The other has to better understand the risk police officers take every day and the fundamental unselfishness of those who choose service.
Officer French’s death is, in many ways, the flip side of many of the videos that have ignited protest and change.
One side does not invalidate the other. On the contrary, one causes the other. And you cannot understand one without seeing the other.
Without that acknowledgment, the cycle can never be broken. Chicago has to make a different choice.
Most of those Chicagoans who die at the end of a gun, day-in, day-out in Chicago, aren’t police officers and their death is not followed by a city in an official state of mourning, nor does anyone write an editorial. But they are still someone’s child. Many have siblings or parents who then stand up and say to a reporter for this newspaper, “this was a kind heart that did not deserve to die.” Look back on those interviews that have appeared on these pages for decades, and you will constantly read a version of French’s statement: “they shot the wrong kid.”
Those who die each weekend here, as the rest of us carry on with our lives, all are made of flesh and blood. They’re likely to have, or have had, flaws just like the rest of us. They also didn’t invent the world into which they grew up, nor did they construct or run one of its more violent cities.
Nor are they to blame for the way it has festered and worsened into a crisis of such scale and resilience as to inure the citizenry from the harsh reality of where they chose and choose to live.
Endemic gun violence is part of Chicago’s history and, in this moment of greater explosion, the city’s potentially fatal flaw.
This is a moment for rebooting our work life, homes, priorities and communities. Or so we’re told and so we say.
We’re all not good for much if we can’t save all our kids and start to put this right.
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