Chicago desperately needs to end the plague of gun violence that shatters lives and destroys neighborhoods. To stop the bloodletting, and restore sanity to areas of the South and West sides, would require building up broken families and neutering gangs. A complex task.

The simpler imperative is solving crimes when they occur, but Chicago falls woefully short on this obligation too. Last year, the Chicago Police Department solved only about 17 percent of the homicides committed. The clearance rate, as it’s called, for nonfatal shootings was an abysmal 5 percent.

This is a disaster for the city.

Target a victim with a gun in Chicago and you’ve got a good chance of getting away with your crime. Each shooting without an arrest means a miscreant stays on the loose, available to hurt and kill again. That convinces other would-be offenders they have little to fear by taking up arms.

In one August weekend of mayhem in Chicago, 75 people were shot, a dozen of them fatally. That’s a lot of victims sent to the hospital, or the morgue. Meanwhile, CPD went to work. How many of these crimes got solved? Three weeks later, according Tribune reporters Jeremy Gorner and Annie Sweeney, the police have charged one person in one shooting, plus made some progress on a handful of other investigations. That’s all: 75 shooting victims, one charged.

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We need to understand more about Chicago’s dreadful clearance rates, which are lower than those of other cities. We don’t expect this is a simple matter of grossly incompetent detective work. If there was an easy fix, no doubt Superintendent Eddie Johnson or Mayor Rahm Emanuel would have embraced it to nab suspects and claim a victory. Instead, CPD’s immediate response to the Aug. 4 weekend violence was to put 600 more officers on the street to prevent a repeat. Yet even that action brought minimal results. Instead of 75 wounded, 12 dead, there were at least 58 wounded, seven dead.

Some of the social and political deficiencies responsible for high crime totals, such as endemic gang culture, contribute to the dearth of arrests. So do the intimidation of witnesses by criminals and, in many neighborhoods, the mistrust of police officers.

Gang-related shootings are as mindless as they are vicious. Much of the violence is retaliatory, involving hit-and-run attacks. The victim may be the intended target or a bystander. As Gorner and Sweeney noted, gang members who get shot may decline to cooperate with police. They’d rather retaliate than seek justice. Innocent victims also may be reluctant to help with police investigations for fear of the gangs.

To prevent and solve crimes, CPD needs to be seen as a trustworthy community presence and partners. This has not been the reality in Chicago, where many minority residents fear the police because of the department’s troubling record of tolerating excess force and abusive behavior. One grim result of the disconnect is Chicago’s long roster of shooting victims, most of them minorities. Ending the pattern starts with City Hallcompleting its agreement to give a federal judge oversight of reforms to supervision, training and accountability.

What else can be done? If CPD and Emanuel need more detectives working cases, they should get on it. The department has seen good results from employing high-tech crime-fighting tactics that get cops to the scenes of shootings more quickly. More of that will help.

In fact, more good policing of all kinds is needed. So is more intolerance of crime among law-abiding Chicagoans, more willingness among witnesses to speak — and, ultimately, more cases solved. The CPD’s abysmal arrest rates are an impediment to a safer city.

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