It is a hallmark of an advanced society that we rarely speak ill of the deceased.
Major public figures can be an exception and all of our lives eventually recede into the historical record where more frank evaluations can and should occur. But in the immediate aftermath of a loss, we rightly pay deference to the feelings of a bereaved family and friends. We don’t dwell on the mistakes we all make in life but instead concentrate on the good. This is especially true when someone dies young and in very distressing circumstances.
Those conditions would apply to the Chicago police Officer Ella French, who was fatally shot in the line of duty in August when a man she and her partner had pulled over in West Englewood opened fire. All decent Chicagoans mourned her loss.
Many months before that horrendous incident, French had been involved in the botched 2019 Police Department raid on the apartment of Anjanette Young, an incident that resulted in the city paying Young a settlement of $2.9 million last December. The month before, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) had issued a report on the raid. Among its recommendations was a three-day suspension for French. Her mistake? Failing to wear a body camera during the raid.
French’s family and fellow officers were understandably outraged by the report. Even Young, who said she was treated with extraordinary harshness by the officers rampaging through her apartment, said that French had been the one police officer that night to show her the dignity all citizens deserve.
At the time, Mayor Lori Lightfoot called the report “tone deaf,” and she was of course right. Yet more to the point was the reality that any such suspension was, in fact, moot, given that Officer French had been killed months before its release.
In its defense at the time, COPA said that, while they regretted any pain caused, they had no legal authority to make redactions from a report completed before French was killed. And some observers argued that the report was the report: Transparency and accountability in police operations required a full and fair appraisal of what went on that night. The moment public officials feel empowered to go into completed reports and remove names and incidents, this thinking went, those very things inherently are compromised.
In this particular case, the reason for the omission or redaction might be unimpeachable, but precedent still would be set for a situation where the moral authority was, at minimum, much less clear. And that’s incontrovertibly true.
This issue has raged on. Andrea Kersten, Lightfoot’s pick to head COPA, was given a hard time in and around a City Council committee, the Tribune reported Wednesday, after some aldermen and other opponents to her nomination expressed fury at the mention of French in a report released while Kersten was the acting head of an agency that many police officers don’t support in the best of times. Nonetheless, the Public Safety Committee approved her by a 9-6 vote and sent the nomination to the full City Council later this month, where we can assume this issue will flair up again.
This is a painful matter and reasonable people can agree that Kersten clearly did not do enough to prepare not only French’s family but the law enforcement community in general for the contents of the report. For this, she has apologized and that apology should be accepted.
But another way to look at this is that French stood for Chicago policing at its best.
Anyone who takes the trouble to educate themselves on what happened in Young’s apartment can quickly see that she was one of the good cops that night, notwithstanding the mistake with the body camera. Chicagoans can weigh all these facts, regret the loss of French in a separate incident, feel deeply for her family and friends, appreciate all she did for the city and still see the benefits of not messing after the fact with finished public reports about policing errors.
We often have called for improved police transparency and accountability, and it would be hypocritical of us to argue that the report should have been compromised. But that position doesn’t mean that we don’t understand the sacrifice and service of a decent police officer. Given the crucial context, her presence in that report should not be seen as a blight on French’s memory. We should all still be able to appreciate what she did for the city and the price she paid.
It’s also worth adding that had that error not happened, none of this debate over French’s memory would be taking place. But the clock cannot be turned back.
This report is not a reason to prevent the confirmation of Kersten, who surely has learned a helpful lesson in how much published findings can impact families and loved ones, no matter what their role in an incident. And we hope she now knows it is better to get ahead of these issues and put them in context in advance.
Chicagoans should understand anew that policing is not just a fraught business but often a matter of life and death for the officers doing their sworn duty, as it can be for citizens who rely on the police for their protection.
The memory of Officer French demands no less.
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