Happy Anniversary, Rochester!

On May 30, 2020 Rochester experienced its first full-blown riot in over fifty years.

That was a year ago.

This explosion of violence, vandalism and looting was detonated by the death of a Black ex-con, George Floyd, while being detained by the police in Minneapolis, Minnesota the week before.

Rochester's "peaceful protest" was orchestrated by Madame Ashley Gantt, leader of the local terrorist organization, Free the People ROC, which is part of the nationwide BLM movement.

It was NOT peaceful.

Beginning as as assembly at Martin Luther King Park during the height of the pandemic, Madame Gantt and her speakers whooped up the attendees into a frenzy, chanting obscenities at and about the police.

Then they chose to march to the Public Safety Building, where they set fire to or vandalized vehicles, throwing objects at the police, hoping to injure them as the police guarded the building.

Then, they dispersed, proceeding to vandalize and loot stores in their paths.

Even the Town of Irondequoit, whose business district borders Rochester, was not spared, suffering the same indignities.

All of this was caught on videos taken by the rioters and looters themselves as they celebrated their "emancipation" from law and order.

Many of the businesses that were destroyed were local, minority owned shops, destroying the hopes and dreams of their own people who were pursuing the "American Dream" in the legal way.

As Madame Gantt put it, she couldn't care less if Rochester burned.

Even more disgusting was they way our elected leaders handled this incident.

Neither the Mayor of Rochester, nor the Irondequoit Town Supervisor, ordered the police to tackle the rioters and looters.

They merely advised people to get out of their way.

Worse, the mayor and her then chief of police, LaRon Singletary, claimed that the "peaceful protest" was "hijacked" by "outsiders," meaning the Antifa anarchists.

That's what the city leaders of all of the other cities plagued with riots were saying, so the mayor and the chief figured that was as good an excuse as any.

The videos of the event and the subsequent arrests based on those videos revealed that the rioters and looters were no such thing.

They were locals and neither the mayor nor her chief of police could bear to admit that it was their own Black community that participated in the riot and looting.

They hoped to spare Rochester's Black community from the responsibility for this mess.

This was the point at which the mayor revealed that she was not the leader Rochester needed, and neither was her chief of police.

But this riot was only the beginning, as Free the People ROC terrorists dominated City politics for the rest of the summer, organizing other demonstrations, blocking traffic, taunting police and getting people fired from public positions if they chose to speak up against them.

They also called for the mayor and the chief's resignations.

Please remember that this was months before it was made public that the mayor and her chief of police conspired to play down the death of a man who died in RPD custody in March of that year.

That, too, produced "peaceful protests" of varying violence and intensity before the weather got cold and they petered out.

The only really useful purpose they served was to reveal the stench of corruption prevalent at City Hall and City Government, to which we are treated almost daily.

But May 30, 2020 was the start of it all.

Happy Anniversary, Rochester!