The media likes to hold up Rochester as a model for various reform efforts. Why? Because people would laugh too hard if they used Detroit. 

Rochester is demolishing highways. It’s advocating police defunding. It’s advancing race reparations. 

All of these bold experiments depend on the mayor not going to prison.

Mayor Lovely Warren however has some less than lovely issues.

Mayor Lovely Warren said she didn’t know about the guns police found in her house last week. Nor about the drugs her estranged husband was carrying when he was arrested.

“I am innocent,” she said Tuesday night.

It’s always great news when your political forum begins by explaining that you don’t know where all the guns came from.

Granison is accused of being part of a cocaine distribution ring. Police found an assault rifle and what they said was an unregistered handgun inside the home he and Warren share with their pre-teen daughter. 

Did I mention that Warren was also fighting for gun control?

So far this year, Rochester Police say they’ve recovered more than 300 illegal guns.

Mayor Lovely Warren has often cited those weapons for playing a part in violent crime.

“I have a 10-year-old daughter at home,” she said in April. “No one wants a child to be shot especially while they’re in their own home, sitting in their living room, right?”

Mayor Warren signed on to Bloomberg’s Everytown gun control front group. Here she is also at a joint event with former New York AG Eric Schneiderman. If you’re wondering why he’s the former, it would be because this happened.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was forced to resign after multiple women accused him of choking and assaulting them. One of the accusers said that Schneiderman, a progressive Democrat, kept calling her his, “brown slave”. Another claimed he had declared, “I am the law”.

Apart from her husband’s issues, Warren was under indictment for campaign fraud.

Warren, who is seeking a third term, was indicted last October on charges she broke campaign finance rules and committed fraud during her 2017 reelection campaign. She has maintained her innocence.

Back in Rochester, Warren informed everyone that she’s not perfect.

She opened the hour-long forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters of the Rochester Metro Area and WROC-TV8, with a veiled reference to recent events, saying: “I don’t have a perfect life. I have a life that is like so many Rochesterians, a life that is imperfect.” 

So did Al Capone. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.

Warren has touted some version of a universal basic income, describing it as reparations, to be funded by tax revenue generated by legalizing marijuana. But will it be enough? “It doesn’t matter the amount,” the mayor said. “The fact is it is important for us to invest in the people, in the neighborhoods that suffered from the criminalization of marijuana.”

So was her husband investing in neighborhoods with the profits from his alleged drug dealing?