Guests - Josh Jacobsen, Betsy Smith, Dr. Carol Lieberman
Ninety days from Arizona's general election, Kathleen Winn devoted Thursday's show to a single argument built from three directions: that Tucson and Pima County are being run into the ground by the people in charge of them, and that the fix runs through the ballot. A crime-policy advocate laid out the local failures case by case. A national police spokesperson widened it to the state and to the federal help she says other cities have accepted. And a psychiatrist weighs in on New York's mayor.
Josh Jacobsen: A 'Sad, Predictable, Tragic Tucson Story'
Josh Jacobsen of Tucson Crime Free, which Winn described as nonpartisan, opened on the congressional race and quickly turned to the record he says explains everything wrong with local justice.
On the CD6 contest, Jacobsen made the case for Ciscomani plainly. He noted the congressman brought roughly $4.5 million to the district for new TPD police cruisers during Chief Chad Kasmar's tenure, and contrasted that with challenger JoAnna Mendoza, whom he tied to defund-the-police funding. On the prostitution remark that has followed Mendoza's campaign, Jacobsen was careful to state it accurately: it came from an interview in which the topic was transgender people struggling to find employment, and the position expressed was that sex work should be decriminalized. Winn's objection was to the premise itself — that selling oneself would be anyone's only value. Jacobsen also flagged Mayor Regina Romero's endorsement of Mendoza as a signal to CD6 voters: "Anybody Mayor Romero is supporting right now is a hard pass."
He set the political stakes against economic data. Citing the University of Arizona's MAP dashboard, Jacobsen said Tucson was the only peer city among Western states to post negative job growth, down half a percent, against a backdrop of a roughly 20 percent poverty rate, rising property taxes and water fees, shrinking U of A enrollment, and a population that is not growing while Mesa prepares to overtake Tucson as the state's second-largest city. "All of the development is going to Maricopa County," he said.
The heart of the segment was the downtown shooting that wounded nine — which Jacobsen walked through from the beginning as "a sad, predictable, yet tragic Tucson story," stressing that his analysis was an explanation, not an excuse. The shooter, he said, came from a hard background, started getting in trouble at 12, and never finished high school. In 2024, at 19, he was involved in an altercation at a car wash around 4:45 a.m. where — on video — he put a laser sight on a worker's chest and fired a shot, missing. Those were strong felonies, Jacobsen said: assault with a deadly weapon and firing a firearm within city limits, carrying a potential two-to-nine-year prison term. But in 2025, he said, County Attorney Laura Conover's office reduced the charges, offered a plea, and took no position at sentencing. The judge, Jacobsen said, faced a defendant with an employer's support letters and a hard-luck story, and imposed simple probation — no prison, no jail, not even intensive probation. "You gave him pretty much a pass to go out and do it again," he said. "And look, he went out and did it again" — this time with nine victims.
Jacobsen returned repeatedly to accountability among named officials, all in the context of their public conduct. He cited the state's offender screening tool — a validated risk instrument approved by the Administrative Office of the Courts, on which "high risk" begins at 16 — and said the downtown shooter had scored a 19, three points over the threshold, information he said was available and ignored. On the judge, Jacobsen identified him as Judge Goodwin, a respected former prosecutor who had run the Special Victims Unit under Barbara LaWall, and noted judges typically don't comment on such cases. His sharpest criticism was reserved for Conover, whom he faulted for an Arizona Daily Star interview conducted, oddly, with an anonymous reporter typing questions on a screen, in which she said there are some 18,000 to 20,000 shots-fired incidents in Pima County a year and that her office cannot try them all. "We're not asking you to go to trial for every one," Jacobsen said. "When someone shoots nine people, maybe."
He raised a second case in the same vein: a hospital nurse who, on camera, assaulted a woman who was hospitalized with uncontrollable seizures and unable to defend herself. Jacobsen said the man faced a potential two-and-a-half-year prison term but received 30 days in jail, and that Conover, defending the outcome, characterized it as "unwanted touching" comparable to what happens to women in bars. "This woman wasn't in a bar. This woman wasn't drunk. This woman was having uncontrollable seizures," Winn said, calling the comparison offensive as a woman, mother, and grandmother, and — drawing on her own time in the Attorney General's office — questioning Conover's competence for the office. Jacobsen said the nurse would have to register as a sex offender.
The pair connected the pattern to broader Tucson decline: leading the state in fentanyl overdoses, a chronic-homeless population that hasn't decreased despite planned spending of $100 million a year for a decade on affordable housing, which Jacobsen said won't change the addiction cycle. "Simply putting a roof over somebody's head does not change the behaviors," he said. He also detailed Tucson's ranking as the fourth-deadliest city in the country for pedestrians despite being only the 33rd-largest — citing Pima County Medical Examiner data that of this year's 28 pedestrian fatalities, 83 percent of those toxicology-screened were high or drunk, and 75 percent occurred outside crosswalks, compounded by some 900 miles of copper wire, worth over $1.2 million, stripped from streetlights that now leave streets dark. On the "gun crime" framing, Jacobsen rejected it: "Guns don't commit crime... otherwise, are we going to start talking about hatchet crime and machete crime?"
Winn used the segment to congratulate Bob Dosey on qualifying for the ballot with clean-elections funding and to note Jeff Rhodes is now in for Supervisor District 5. She closed by congratulating Jacobsen on personal news — he and his wife are expecting another son. "They need to live in a crime-free city," she said, "and we're all committed to that."
Betsy Brantner Smith: Federal Help, the FBI, and the Case Against Hobbs
Betsy Brantner Smith, spokesperson for the National Police Association, picked up the crime thread and widened it. She opened on the same pedestrian statistics — a subject she said her husband, Dave Smith, has raised nationally for years — and on a drive down Silverbell to an appointment, where she said every corner held homeless people, some "cranked out of their minds," wandering into the roadway. It left her and her husband, she said, considering whether they'll have to move out of Pima County. "This is why this election is so important."
Her national news was an in-depth interview she'd conducted with supervisory special agent John Nantz, a retired FBI agent who writes for Townhall and appears on Newsmax, and who, with fellow retired agent Chris Hinkle, recently met with FBI Director Kash Patel at headquarters. Smith noted the National Police Association — thanks, she said, to Congressman Abe Hamadeh — was the first police organization to endorse Patel. She argued the far-left media portrays Patel as a goof while he makes significant changes, taking on questions like the origins of Crossfire Hurricane and the Steele dossier.
Smith's central pitch was that federal help is available for the asking. Cities like Memphis, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, she said, have been transformed by partnerships in which the federal government brings in agents — not just ICE or FBI, but ATF, DEA, and dozens of other agencies among the more than 80 that exist — along with federal prosecutors. Tucson, with its federal building and courthouse downtown, would be an easy fit, she argued; all the governor or mayor need do is ask. Instead, she said, when any federal agent appears, "you've got Adelita Grijalva and Regina and their ilk screaming" that they must be ICE, driving law enforcement away. She described a Tucson Police Department once respected and innovative, now so short-staffed that a home burglary may only get an email report, with good officers retiring or transferring out. She repeated her recurring frustration that Chief Monica Prieto allows the department "to be used by these far-left Democrat socialists."
On the governor's race, Smith rejected the claim that Andy Biggs would raise taxes — "such a total lie" — arguing he wants to eliminate the income tax, while Katie Hobbs and her running mate, former Mesa mayor John Giles (whom both Winn and Smith characterized as a Republican in name only who endorsed Kamala Harris and once suggested Jeff Flake challenge Trump), would raise taxes. Smith called Hobbs the "veto queen" with over 400 vetoes, noted she is under investigation for alleged pay-to-play schemes involving licensing, and faulted Attorney General Kris Mayes for declining to investigate. She closed on the economy: "The Trump economy is booming, but the media doesn't want you to know it. We can't stay in our little bubbles." Winn added her reminder that a crisis — COVID last time — can disrupt a booming economy, and previewed James Rogers appearing Friday to discuss the suit against Secretary of State Adrian Fontes over the SAVE Act ballot language.
Dr. Carol Lieberman: Extremism, and the Fight Over Ground Zero
Dr. Carol Lieberman — a board-certified psychiatrist, author, and media commentator Winn introduced as "America's psychiatrist," whose latest book is Lions and Tigers and Terrorists, Oh My! How to Protect Your Child in a Time of Terror — closed the show on the psychology of rising extremism, and on New York mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The hook was the September 11th anniversary. Lieberman described a petition, organized by a 9/11 widower named Giovanni Galante and signed by tens of thousands — Winn put the figure at 72,000 — asking that Mamdani be barred from the Ground Zero ceremony. Lieberman's characterization of Mamdani was blunt and repeated: she called him a terrorist, saying she had once described him as a terrorist sympathizer but now, as he "shows his true colors" siding with terrorists and against Israel, believes the stronger word applies. Winn, saying near the segment's end, "I do think Mamdani is a terrorist. I think it's okay to say that. And you're the professional." Lieberman argued Mamdani's attendance would be triggering for people with PTSD and potentially unsafe for him, given the opposition — "we should keep him away for his own safety." Winn's framing was about the day's meaning: "You are not the star of the show that day."
Lieberman placed Mamdani within what she called a "red-green alliance" — a collaboration between socialists and Marxists on one side and, in her framing, terrorists on the other, united by a shared hostility to America. She argued figures like him rise by starting in lower ranks and promising "free everything," drawing together two voter blocs that need not agree on much beyond that animating goal. Both traced the appeal to the young: a generation without memory of 9/11, raised in some cases by anxious or struggling parents, and habituated during COVID to government checks. "The checks have run out. The government's dysfunctional," Winn said, tying it back to the local ask — supervisors and the Tucson council wanting, in her words, "to put their hands in our pockets one more time" in a failing city and county.
The pair worked through Mamdani's record as Lieberman saw it — a proposed tax on owners of second properties, and a related episode in which she said he published a list of affected owners' names and addresses. Lieberman, having looked it up, noted New York's doxxing law generally requires accompanying harassment to be chargeable. On a claimed ID requirement at his proposed city-run grocery stores, she corrected herself on air: that had turned out to be a rumor rather than fact. Both argued the broader grocery plan is collapsing under its own economics, driving out billionaires and threatening surrounding mom-and-pop stores.
Winn brought it home to Arizona and CD6, warning that Mamdani-style politics is not confined to New York. She characterized Ciscomani's opponent as aligned with Grijalva and Romero — against guns, for open borders, and for Medicare for all — in a district split roughly evenly among Democrats, independents, and Republicans, making the race one of the most contested in the country. Lieberman's warning was that such candidates "fly under the radar," letting voters see the appealing promises without the hole underneath. Winn's closing note returned to self-reliance: she and her husband raised seven self-sufficient children, paid for college and weddings, and have nineteen grandchildren with another on the way. "That's the greatest gift a parent can give," she said, "not self-reliance on the government."
She sent listeners into the day with the season's refrain: ninety days to an election that can change the state's direction, achieved "not by putting the same people in that have led us here, but by bringing back great leadership."