CLARENCE PAGE: 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 this month in an incident that also left her partner 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.

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 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.

Fortunately, local and federal resources managed to work together well enough to arrest and charge two Chicago brothers, Emonte Morgan, 21, and Eric Morgan, 22, with the shooting, which reportedly began with a traffic stop. The feds also charged Jamel Danzy, 29, of Hammond with conspiracy to violate federal firearms laws in connection with the straw purchase of the alleged murder weapon in Indiana.

Lightfoot has cooperated with the feds to help get off Chicago streets guns that have been streaming from neighboring states that have looser gun laws.

But the larger challenges of low police morale and fractured community relations rage on, as more than 70 people were reported shot in the city two weekends ago.

What to do? The most glaring and long-running issue in my view as a former Chicago police reporter may be the city’s low clearance rate, meaning crimes that have led to at least one arrest. After some improvement in recent years, CPD’s clearance rate dipped in 2020 from 50.3 percent the previous year to 44.5 percent.

That shortfall in arrests sounds even worse when you count by race.

An analysis of murder investigations in Chicago by WBEZ radio in 2019 found that “when the victim was white, 47 percent of the cases were solved. … For Hispanics, the rate was about 33 percent. When the victim was African American, it was less than 22 percent.”

In other words, the killer of a Black victim has more of a chance of getting away with it — and overwhelmingly most of those killers are also Black. As an African American, I have seen much too often how too little policing in your neighborhood can be just as dangerous as having too much. As the mayor says, we Chicagoans have met our common enemy — and to a shocking degree, as Pogo might say, it is us.

Contact Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.