They’re not trying to defund the Rochester Police Department, they are trying to destroy it.
I’m not talking about the protesters. I’m talking about the mayor and her staff.
In a month, the RPD has gone from being one of the most capable and capably led police departments in the country, to a rudderless hulk being swept to ruin in a current of incompetence and politics.
In a month, Lovely Warren has undone 20 years of leadership development and put the department in the hands of people completely incapable to the task.
That’s a reality that the people of Rochester will have to deal with long after the mayor’s scandal-ridden administration is done.
Here’s where it was.
A month ago, the Rochester Police Department was led by a command group with a higher percentage of people of color than almost any other mid-sized metropolitan department in the country. And those individuals were police officers of extraordinary ability and accomplishment. That wasn’t an accident. That was the result of more than two decades of steady recruitment and encouragement. Not a quota system or some sort of tokenism, but a culture of invitation and responsibility, in which talented people were invited to consider a career in law enforcement and then welcomed into an organization that highly valued individual growth and excellence.
That produced a core of leaders – overwhelmingly black men – who were true and principled professionals, a great asset to their city and highly respected by their subordinates. Any one of them could, and probably would have eventually, served successfully as chief of police.
But they were all chased out by the mayor. She created an ethical environment in which they could not stay. Their integrity was the knife used to slit their professional throats.
And now she has announced her new command group. Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan as interim chief, Moses Robinson as some undefined senior officer in the chief’s office – he was nixed as deputy chief when it was realized that in 34 years on the job he had never once supervised anyone, and an obscure captain, Gabriel Person, as deputy chief of operations.
These are no doubt good people, and Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan is universally seen as a kind, good-hearted and well-liked person.
But they are not cop bosses.
And Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan and Moses Robinson are not people who are going to stand up well to public scrutiny of their personnel files. If the newspaper continues its crusade of expose every cop’s personnel records, it will find in their pasts actions and accusations ill-suited to senior position.
Some of the incidents are from a long time ago, and have been handled internally and confidentially because, in fairness, that’s what they deserve. But pushing these individuals into the public spotlight, months after the repeal of the 50-A shield of police personnel files, sets them up for controversy, and ensures that the department will get more negative and embarrassing headlines.
It will also be disillusioning for younger officers whose careers have been lived in an era of higher standards and scrutiny.
God bless the new chief as she goes forward, but the deck has been stacked against her.
And the long knives will be out for her.
Anti-police activists on the streets and in City Council aren’t looking for new faces, they want to defund and dissolve the police department. They don’t want to improve its function, they want to stop its function. And Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan will either by their ally or their victim.
She is either one of the wolves or she is a lamb being led to slaughter.
And that’s on the mayor.
When the Monroe County grand jury rises on Friday, it is likely to hand down a felony indictment against Lovely Warren. That will commence a desperate legal and political battle to try to save her political career and the faltering political organization of recently deceased Assemblyman David Gantt.
Her indictment, the failed effort of her faction to retain control of the Democratic caucus in the Monroe County Legislature, and the unsuccessful Assembly bid of ally Ernest Flagler-Mitchell are all body blows to the operation that empowered Lovely Warren. While she scrambles to escape her likely political and legal doom, she isn’t going to give a damn about the police department, and will probably be tempted to use its dissection as a bargaining chip.
And that might be what this new command group is all about.
Whether she knows it or not, Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan’s job as skipper of the RPD might be to sail it to the scrap yard.
A sacrifice to the failed administration of Lovely Warren.