It is a hallmark of an advanced society that we rarely speak ill of the deceased.
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.