Where to begin.
With the two black kids who set the old white man on fire, with the snow job by the Fifth Avenue lawyer, with the call by the preacher for only black cops to be allowed in command positions, or with the assertion that the guy who came after the cop with a butcher knife got shot because of the “white supremacist lens of policing?”
It’s a dark Monday morning in the Flower City, and not just because of daylight saving time.
If you’re looking for stupid, it’s a target-rich environment. If you’re looking for common sense and human decency, you’re crap out of luck.
If you’re looking for a path forward out of the swamp of conflict and hatred that grips Rochester, New York, you’re going to be disappointed. Your best move is to pack up and move to Tennessee, like everybody else. If you can’t do that, disappear as far into suburbia and the region as you can, and don’t look back. Just let the trash fire burn itself out.
Let’s start with the Daniel Prude investigation, conducted at great expense by a Manhattan lawyer who seems to specialize in ass covering. He released 80 pages of preconceived conclusions that totally snowed the folks on the evening news. The question was: Who was responsible for covering up the death of Daniel Prude for some six months?
Fifth Avenue said it was everybody, so nobody, and sound bite on the 6 o’clock was lost in the sauce, and then it was the weekend, and Lovely Warren starts the week with the best re-election prospects she’s had since they unsealed the indictment against her. Seemingly unable to say that the mayor lied to cover her ass, Fifth Avenue placed blame at the feet of the fired police chief saying that, though he told the mayor immediately and repeatedly about Mr. Prude and the circumstances of his death, he did not “capture the disturbing tenor of the entire encounter.”
Which might be a reflection of the fact that, “disturbing tenor” may not mean the same thing to a white New York City lawyer in tailored suits as it does to a black guy who’s spent his entire adult life as a cop wading through the piss and blood on the streets of Rochester.
I mean, unwashed reality can be scary when you’re a name partner.
At any rate, all the unblinking eye got out of it was that everybody was bad, and they had more file footage of the police chief, so he took the fall. Never mind the corporation counsel, who comes off as dishonest and/or incompetent with a side of oafish, and the communications director who probably should do most his work wearing rubber gloves and a face shield – and that’s not a covid reference.
So, before noon on Friday, the good cop got reamed and the bad mayor got cleared and the city’s power dive into the deck kicked in the afterburners.
And then, at half past noon on Friday, in came the 911 call from Lyell and Murray about the letter carrier trying to put out the burning man.
When the crews got there, it might have been the RG&E man who tried to put him out, the burns were second and third degree, and over 70 percent of his body, and the cops were looking for a 16-year-old and a 14-year-old.
And in a world where everything anymore seems to be about race, nobody wanted to mention the fact that the teens where black and the old man was white, and they watched him burn a bit, after they sprayed him and lit him, and they told him to say it was two white guys who did it.
Over the weekend, when they caught the 16-year-old, they announced that he was a minor, and that he would disappear into the juvenile justice system, charged with assault and attempted arson. Attempted arson? What percent of the victim needs to be burned for it to be an actual, successful arson?
It doesn’t matter. Juvenile crime is prosecuted by the Soros-backed, turn-them-all-loose Democratic county administration and a juvenile with an assault conviction gets a gold star on his GED, so no worries. You’ll never hear another word about this.
Certainly not from the mayor and the police chief.
Though, relief of reliefs, it was announced that this was not domestic violence.
Nobody will ask if it was a hate crime.
That gets us to the press conference about the sad case of the guy who charged at a cop with a knife and got shot dead. Sad in that the young man’s troubles and choices led him to take such a heartbreaking act, and sad that the cop involved is now going to be socially and professionally destroyed.
At any rate, the reverend said that the death was the fault not just of the police officer and the police department, but of white supremacy, specifically the “white supremacist lens of policing.”
Not to be snarky about the death of a beloved son and brother, but this wasn’t racism, it was self-defense. Period. And proclamations to the contrary simply aren’t true.
Nonetheless, the minister demanded that half of the department’s officers be black, and that the black officers must always be in charge.
Because that’s the only way we can fight racism.
With more racism.
I’d go through the various people shot over the weekend, and the young man killed while sitting in his car, up on Glenwood, but nobody really seems to care about those black lives.