LOVELY FIRED LA'RON TO HUMILIATE HIM AND STRIP HIM OF BENEFITS

La’Ron Singletary was sitting in a meeting when a participant across the table, who worked in police department administration, said she’d just gotten an email saying that he had been fired by the mayor.

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It was a bolt out of the blue.

At public odds with the mayor about who was or was not involved in a seeming cover-up of the Daniel Prude death, he had recently put in his retirement papers, giving the city, in effect, his two-week notice. It was a hard parting, and the end of a mostly brilliant 20-year career, the story of a city kid challenged since high school to make the most of himself and, ultimately, the department he joined.

And he had been successful. A very young chief, he put together a command group that was the best anyone in the department remembered. Mostly black, and completely competent, La’Ron and his deputies were riding high.

But for five months the city sat on the obviously troublesome circumstances of Daniel Prude’s passing, and when lawyers for his survivors blew it wide open with a series of video releases, the mayor said she’d known nothing about it and she hung it around the police chief’s neck.

Which led to the retirement, on principle.

Principles. Those can be rare things these days.

But the admin lady said she’d been notified to process his firing, that the mayor had ordered his immediate termination, and he jumped up to go to City Hall to find out what was happening.

He was going to drive, but the mayor had already had his city-issued car seized.

Instead of City Hall, a letter had been left, ordering him upstairs at the Public Safety Building to the Professional Standards Section, where they confiscated his badge, his gun, his keys, his identification, and told him he had to turn in his uniform.

This is La’Ron Singletary. A Boy Scout. A guy with a clean nose and a clean conscience, a straight arrow who had spent all of his adult life serving the city of Rochester. A police chief who had the admiration of the people in the squad cars and the people in the neighborhoods.

And this is how Lovely did him.

He had to call to get a ride home, a ride in a city car had been forbidden, and to have someone bring him in some civilian clothes to wear home.

And then he was escorted out of the Public Safety Building.

But that’s just the insult, not the injury.

By firing him days before his retirement began, the mayor cost La’Ron lifetime medical and dental coverage. Earned by his 20 years, but separate from his pension, her decision stripped him of that additional benefit. That will cost his family some $20,000 a year. Having given notice like a gentleman, he opened himself to this hateful maliciousness. A dishonorable deed done an honorable man.

And this is how Lovely did him.

And how she did the department, and the community it serves.

Because she didn’t have a replacement. She didn’t have a plan. All that mattered was destroying La’Ron. All the department’s captains declined consideration for the chief’s position, as did all the lieutenants, and the few sergeants who were asked. Ultimately, she chose a retired police officer, a political appointee to the troubled Rochester Housing Authority, as the new chief, and the only captain who would accept a promotion, as the new deputy.

It was he who was contacted by an interagency drug task force to get final sign off on a series of raids associated with a long-standing drug investigation. He said he would have to get the mayor’s approval. Word came back that it wasn’t a good day for the mayor. She was swearing in the new interim chief and City Hall didn’t want any distractions.

Now the department is running scared. Officers who had been close to the chief or his command group are afraid of further punitive strikes by the mayor. Everyone is keeping their head down and staying close to the union. Officers, especially prominent officers, have had protesters at their homes, and suspect that their addresses have been leaked, either by the mayor or by some on City Council.

And last week the mayor ordered the silencing of two Twitter accounts used by the police department, which reported on incidents of violent crime, seizures of illegal guns, and ran pictures of rioters, looters and gunmen, identifying them with the assistance of the public.

Meanwhile, La’Ron Singletary is looking for work.

But is finding nothing but closed doors. Almost like someone had blackballed him.

And Rochester is left with a mayor who is not only under federal indictment, but has also alienated the most powerful politicians in the region, coming off a weekend where there were seven separate shooting.

And that is how Lovely did you.

- by Bob Lonsberry © 2020

In the dark of a midwinter night, on the banks of the Potomac River, the cannon fired and the band played and the multicolored rockets flew, as the Republic celebrated a new president and an old promise, to liberty and independence and the will of we, the people.

In the dark of that same midwinter night, near the banks of the Irondequoit Creek, in the thundering roar of 11 tons of olive-drab mercy, three soldiers drove a big Black Hawk over farm and field and family home, training to fight and training to save, keeping the promise of This We’ll Defend, keeping the flag flying and the home fires lit and doing the will of we, the people.

That’s how it works.

We have pomp and ceremony, institutions and symbols, monuments and memorials, touchstones of 245 years of red, white and blue and the land of the free. And we have men and women of grit and courage, doing hard things in the service of others, around the clock, honing the bayonet of national defense, proving and proving and proving again that we are the home of the brave.

The two are parts of the whole, indispensable and inseparable. The flag flies not as a gift from the world, an entitlement of the universe, but because we put it up and stand ready to snap the neck of anybody who tries to take it down. The president isn’t the commander in chief of the Army and Navy because it sounds cool, but because national existence is tied to national defense, and we don’t have a freedom we can’t protect or a nation we can’t secure, and the halls of power are established by the fields of battle.

And we prevail on those fields of battle because we train. Because we prepare. We drill. We push. We demand. We demonstrate. We do it around the clock and across the calendar. In sun and rain and heat and cold.

And in the dark of a midwinter night.

The New York Army National Guard Aviation Support Facility is a spic-and-span operation on the backside of the airport, down near where people sometimes park to watch the planes take off and land, a dress-right-dress swath of Army green on the edge of the Greater Rochester International Airport and its commercial aviation.

You get there by driving down Scottsville Road and turning right onto Patriot Way. But from there you can go anywhere in the world. Anywhere in the world somebody raises a fist at America and tries to swing it. Anywhere in the world an American soldier lies wounded and needs somebody hot and heavy to come in and get him.

Anywhere in New York that heavy airlift or medivac or eyes in the sky are needed and citizen soldiers can come under rotor to help.

The New York Army National Guard Aviation Support Facility.

Where last night three cars sat late in the parking lot with no one to drive them home.

Home. Where wars are really fought and sacrifice is truly felt. Where going there means leaving here, and leaving the loves and the dreams and purposes of life. You don’t fight, the hero says, because you hate what’s in front of you, you fight because you love what’s behind you. And home is what’s behind you. And inside you. And driving you.

The New York Army National Guard Aviation Support Facility.

Where there’s the dust of Afghanistan in the corners and the tears of loss in the eyes.

A security camera on somebody’s garage captured the approaching sound of the big Sikorsky airframe and General Electric motors. There was an increase in volume and a throbbing oscillation, not the quick whack-a whack-a of slapping blades, but a moan that rose and fell, and then something that sounded like everything coming loose and metal striking metal, like a mechanism coming apart.

There are a lot of houses out there, and snow-covered farmers’ fields. And sometimes the last thing you do is save somebody else’s life, and the big bird veered toward an expanse where they grow corn or beans or some other fruit of the American soil.

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Soil bought and paid for and consecrated by the shedding of American blood.

They were the first military casualties of the new presidency. Three soldiers, three National Guardsmen, who died as assuredly in our service and to our benefit as if they had perished on a foreign battlefield, instead of in a neighboring town.

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They call it Patriot Way for a reason.

And it says US ARMY on their chest as a reminder.

To us and them and all the world, that we know freedom isn’t free, and independence isn’t automatic. Americans have always know that, and Americans have never shied away from paying the price.

And last night in a snowy field, while the band played and the president waved, three heroes died in our service, and three families were wounded in our cause.

That’s what keeps the flag flying and the Republic aright, and the institutions of liberty intact.

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And that’s what we must never forget.

- by Bob Lonsberry © 2021