Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren says the first few threatening calls she received came on her cell phone.
“I got a couple of blocked calls,” she says. “‘You don’t deserve to be mayor.’ ‘How long do you think you’ll be around?’ That type of stuff.”
She tried to disregard them, she says. And then a local radio station alerted her to the fact that someone had tried to hack into the station to put what Warren calls negative, degrading, and racial comments on the air.
Warren says the station alerted the authorities, and that’s when she decided to ask then-Police Chief James Sheppard for advice. Sheppard told her, she says, that he’s always believed the mayor should have security.
Warren’s hiring of a two-person personal security team has raised questions about extravagance and nepotism. The guards are on call 24-7, and will earn a combined salary of more than $140,000. One of the guards, Reggie Hill, is a retiring state trooper and is also Warren’s uncle.
In an interview at City Hall last week, Warren said the situation got worse when the media reported that as a teenager, her husband, Timothy Granison, was the driver of a car whose occupants were involved in an armed robbery. He received probation, and because of his status as a youthful offender, his record was sealed.
“Outing” her husband put the whole family at risk, Warren said, including the couple’s young daughter. Granison began to get calls, too, Warren said.
“The threats started to get a lot more real,” she said, “especially after the thing that came out with my husband: ‘How long do you think your wife’s going to be around?’ ‘Oh, that’s a beautiful daughter you have.'”
Once Warren decided she needed security, she said, the city’s human resources department began looking at options. The department found that the least expensive way to protect her is with a private security force, Warren said.
“I don’t want to get into any issues of overtime,” she said, “because I know how my schedule is. Sometimes I leave at 7 o’clock in the morning and I don’t come home until 9 o’clock at night.
“We thought this was the cheapest way to do this temporarily,” Warren said.
The jobs are being posted, she said, and both members of her team will have to go through the Civil Service process if they want to stay on.
The level of vitriol she’s experienced since becoming mayor has exceeded her expectations, she said. “It’s just, people are cruel. People wanting me to die. Wishing I was poisoned. But I’m not here for those people. I’m here for the people that want to see great things in Rochester, and that’s what I plan on doing.”
Lovely Warren | Rochester Police Department | Reggie Hill | Security
This article appears in Jan 22-28, 2014.
I find Mayor Warren’s recent comments on her first two weeks in office convincing. The vitriol and personal attacks against her on the internet are disgusting and painful for me to read, and her desire for a security detail makes good sense. It’s certainly her choice.
At the same time, hiring her uncle was dumb, and the whole speeding business is just stupid. Her reactions to the predictable uproar were poor. So, what’s going on?
Well, her grandfather (one of the most important people in her life) suffered a stroke and died just she was taking office. My father died almost exactly a year ago and, even though we knew he was dying months in advance, I was in shock. I wasn’t getting hate mail and I wasn’t taking over the reigns of New York’s third largest city. If Mayor Warren wasn’t in shock then she isn’t human.
Mayor Warren’s been in politics for quite a few years now. I’ve seen her run meetings at City Council. She does a good job. She’s neither an idiot or a fool. I’m sure she’s ambitious (that goes with the job), but I choose to believe that she’s trying hard to make Rochester a better place.
Occam’s razor suggests that, when faced with competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. What are the hypotheses here:
(1) Mayor Warren is David Gantt’s evil minion who pretended to be competent for years so that she could rapaciously descend on Rochester and extract trivial sums of money in the clumsiest way possible.
(2) She made a bunch of bad decisions after the twin shocks of her grandfather’s death and taking office.
I’ve got to go with the second choice.
Jim Mayer
Rochester, NY
I understand that the threats against Lovely Warren are real. I do not understand the need for two bodyguards. I assume that when Lovely is inside city hall, she is safe. When she travels away from city hall on official business, why doesn’t RPD provide security.
There is still something very fundamental that bothers me about this situation. Lovely gets threats and deals with by hiring body guards at taxpayer expense. Most Rochestarians do not have specific or known threats against them. They have to wonder which car driving down the street might point a gun out the window to start shooting. Do the citizens of Rochester get for extra protection?
This could be an opportunity for Lovely to simply work on the bigger picture of threats of crime everyone faces and not put the focus on the extra special security she is giving herself.
As has been pointed out in another discussion, I do hope that Lovely Warren has reported these credible threats to the police so they can investigate. Possibly even the FBI should be involved especially if there are racially-oriented threats against this public official. It seems that hiring security people to protect her makes sense, but I do hope that that is not the only thing that has been done in response to the threats she has reported receiving.
After she won, I had this fleeting thought: “She is going to drive to work like everybody else. Got to admire her for that.”
Hey Rochester musician, hiring your family for a position no one else had a chance at is called nepatism and is expressly forbidden. Costing the tax payers another $140,000 is a joke.