LONSBERRY: RPD Hush on Gantt Wreck is Unacceptable

I love the Rochester Police Department.

               But it crapped the bed on the David Gantt wreck.

               The most senior – and highest paid – politician in the region, who happens to be the mayor’s political patron and spiritual father, runs a stop sign and sends a vanful of kids to the hospital, and four days later the police department still hasn’t said anything of substance.

               That’s unacceptable.

               That level of ball dropping starts to smell like cover up.

               It was 7:30 Thursday night at Central Park and a car everybody but the RPD knows was driven by Assemblyman David Gantt ran a stop sign and t-boned a family vehicle.

               Everybody in the struck vehicle went to the hospital. Thankfully, they didn’t have to stay.

               The first official word was that tickets had been issued on both sides, creating the false sense of equal guilt.

               Turns out the driver of the van didn’t have a seatbelt on. Likewise, no driver’s license – not an altogether uncommon occurrence on the streets of Rochester.

               But that driver was, otherwise, operating the van in a safe and lawful manner.

               The mysterious driver of a sedan, on the other hand, was “distracted” and didn’t see the stop sign or the appropriately operated vehicle, and caused the wreck.

               That was the city of Rochester’s most-powerful politician.

               And nobody would have known if Channel 10 hadn’t said something. And even now, on Monday morning, the Rochester Police Department has somehow not managed to officially identify the driver of the sedan.

               Which is pure bull crap.

               In a city where “building trust with the community” is the end all and be all, keeping this on the down low is about the opposite of trust. And the police department needs to speak freely and speak soon.

               For example, what is it that supposedly “distracted” the mayor’s friend and longtime employer?

               Was he eating a sandwich? Was he texting? Did he drop something? Was he shouting at Bob Matthews on the radio? What the hell was going on in that car that David Gantt didn’t see a van directly in his path?

               And how does a guy who owns property in that very neighborhood and has frequented it for decades forget that there is a stop sign? And what makes him or any driver think that, even if it’s his first day on that street, that a smaller street crossing a larger street doesn’t have a stop sign?

               This is the man, after all, who headed the Assembly’s Transportation Committee. Richly, he was the manipulator of red-light cameras in New York. And he runs a stop sign.

               Where is the body camera video from officers’ interaction with David Gantt that night?

               Did officers administer a field sobriety examination? If so, why, and if not, why not?

               What was Mr. Gantt’s demeanor toward police? Contacts in the past have sometimes been rough. Was that pattern followed this time?

               With Mr. Gantt reportedly being too ill to attend to his Assembly duties for most of the last two years, what was the state of his health? Was he well enough to be operating a motor vehicle, and if not did his illness contribute to the wreck?

               What communications took place between the officers on the scene and the department’s chain of command, and were those communications consistent with what would happen in the average car wreck of this nature?

               Was the mayor notified? Did she subsequently receive information on the incident?

               The Rochester Police Department is middling at public communication. It’s good at responding to reporters’ inquiries about specific incidents. It’s good at pictures of cops at neighborhood meetings and churches and barber shops and playing catch with kids in the street. But beyond that, it’s not so good.

               And this incident showed some poor thinking or poor planning for the handling of VIP incidents.

               The wreck happened at 7:30. The department should have put out a news release identifying Assemblyman Gantt and detailing the circumstances of the incident by 10 p.m. Rochester should have learned about it on the 11 o’clock news.

               That’s openness and transparency.

               In the overnight of Thursday into Friday, the Rochester Police Department sent out two unsolicited press releases. Further, at noon on Friday – before the Channel 10 report – the chief’s office sent out another press release. This shows that the command structure of the department could and did engage in public communications in the 20 hours after the Gantt wreck, but it chose not to do so in regard to the Gantt wreck.

               And that’s not acceptable.

               For any politician or prominent figure, but most particularly for the man who, with the mayor, controls Rochester city politics. A person this powerful, and this close to the mayor, cannot fly under the radar.

               And everybody knows that.

               Except, apparently, whoever at the police department is handling this matter.

               It’s time to speak, and to speak openly and freely.