Guests - Tracy Murphy, Matt Neely, Dave Smith
Kathleen Winn opened the week off a birthday weekend and into a show bracketed by a single theme: accountability, and its collapse. A sheriff's candidate in Washington State described a fight to keep the office answerable to voters. Producer Matt Neely tracked the manhunt following the murder of a Tucson police recruit. And former Pima County Republican chair Dave Smith ranged from the WNBA to surveillance cameras to Minneapolis, returning each time to the argument that a society which stops enforcing consequences stops functioning. Tomorrow, Winn noted, would bring a cabinet-level guest — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — in the show's second hour.
Tracy Murphy: The Fight for the Constitutional Sheriff
Tracy Murphy, a candidate for sheriff in Lewis County, Washington, returned to the show having advanced through his state's top-two primary. A 35-year law enforcement veteran who started as a volunteer cadet at 16, Murphy is running in a rural county of roughly 87,000 people between Seattle and Portland — a place he called still conservative, "180 degrees different" from King County and Seattle, where voters were moving to recall their mayor.
Murphy's central issue is accountability, including for the powerful. "Investigating public corruption is high on the list," he said, "because that's where we the people don't have trust in our government." When elected officials violate their oath, he argued, consequences already exist on the books — but no one wants to enforce them. Rebuilding public trust, in his telling, means holding everyone accountable "regardless of who you are and regardless of what position in society you hold."
The heart of the segment was a Washington law Murphy said was designed to bring sheriffs to heel. Rather than removing the election of sheriffs outright, the state moved to route certification through a Criminal Justice Training Commission — a body he said is controlled by the governor — with the power to revoke, suspend, or deny the certification a sheriff needs to hold office. "You still have your elected sheriff," he explained, "but they have the ability to remove them and control them if they don't like what they're doing." The motive, as he seesit, is control: legislators engaged in "nefarious activities" don't want an independently elected officer with the standing to investigate them.
The courts, for now, have sided with the sheriffs. Murphy recounted that eight sheriffs sued, and on April 29th a Thurston County Superior Court judge ruled the law unconstitutional and stayed it; the following week, he said, the Washington Supreme Court upheld the injunction, leaving the controls unenforceable while the case proceeds. Winn's delight was open — "isn't that great that a law enforcement officer would enforce the law and the rules and the Constitution as opposed to what some bureaucrats wanted to do." Asked what a Murphy administration looks like, he described servant leadership, adequately staffed and properly trained deputies, thorough and timely investigations of every complaint, attention to cold cases and unprosecuted suspects, and a jail system with the infrastructure to actually hold offenders. "Writing them a ticket and giving them a court date and letting them go is not keeping people safe."
Matt Neely: The Manhunt After Carlos Ramirez
Producer Matt Neely joined to update the killing the show had broken the week before. The victim, Winn confirmed, was Carlos Ramirez, a former Pima County corrections officer a week from graduating the Tucson Police Department academy. He and his fiancée — herself a corrections officer, and, per later reporting, pregnant — were shot in their home near Valencia and Camino Verde in the far southwest of town; Ramirez was killed, his fiancée wounded.
Neely laid out the weekend's developments from the public record. Investigators had tracked three suspects across surveillance video — one at a gas station on Valencia, another from vehicle video less than half a mile from the studio, near the Palo Verde overpass, where the suspects' Acura MDX was abandoned at 33rd and Palo Verde. Santiago Jorge Rogers, 39, was arrested Saturday at a hotel near Palo Verde and Irvington and faces first-degree murder and aggravated assault charges. A second suspect had been located, with detectives still determining his involvement. Authorities continued searching for Alex James Barnett, 33, who faces a first-degree murder warrant; Neely relayed the official description — last seen on a 2020 Harley-Davidson, six foot two, 315 pounds, with multiple arm tattoos — and the standing reward of up to $2,500 through 88-Crime for information leading to his arrest, with the public urged to call 911 rather than approach him. Barnett, Neely said, carries a long violent criminal history and has been in and out of prison, last released late the prior year.
Both connected the killing to the broader argument the show has pressed for weeks. Neely recalled that when County Attorney Laura Conover appeared on Bill Buckmaster's program the previous Friday, she appeared to preempt questions about the suspect's record by noting that his earlier case had been adjudicated in March 2021 under her predecessor, Barbara LaWall. The larger point, for Neely, was the danger of the profession and the cost of understaffing a force he traced to the anti-police climate of 2020: "You had everybody marching in the street saying cops are bad, cops are bad — and they're like, well, we're having a recruiting problem." Winn tied it to the funerals she attended during her years in the Attorney General's office, from Border Patrol agent Brian Terry — killed with a weapon from the Fast and Furious operation — to the aftermath of the Gabby Giffords shooting, and hoped Ramirez's academy class would "bond over this" and press to fix what failed. Both invoked the 2020 in-custody death of Carlos Ingram Lopez, which Neely said the police department's own leadership concluded was not a case of officers failing to do their jobs, as an example of a narrative the mayor embraced for political reasons. Neely noted that Councilwoman Lane Santa Cruz had publicly called modern policing a vestige of slave-catching — "absolute nonsense," in his words — while arguing that most residents still respect the officers who keep them safe.
Neely also flagged a shift on the City Council: Councilwoman Nikki Lee, whom he called smart and full of promise, will not seek reelection, and Councilman Paul Cunningham announced he won't run for his seat either, amid speculation — which Cunningham has not shut down — that he may challenge Mayor Regina Romero. Neely argued Lee had been marginalized by the council's dominant bloc, citing the rejection of a proposed thin-blue-line painting near the police station and the quick dismissal of her suggestion to restore bus fares.
Dave Smith: The WNBA, and the War on Caitlin Clark
Dave Smith opened his hour on the WNBA, delighted that former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White had declared for the women's draft to make a point about the league's undefined eligibility rules. Freedom, he noted, wore a shirt defining a woman as an adult human female and celebrated when Sophie Cunningham sank a three — Cunningham's offense, Smith said with heavy sarcasm, being that "she wanted to protect girls in sports."
The bulk of the segment was a granular case that Caitlin Clark is being targeted, on the court and by her own team. Smith, whose daughter-in-law is an Iowa fanatic, walked through Clark's numbers in the Fever's win over the Chicago Sky — 37 points, a career-high eight of twelve from three, ten assists — against season averages he called elite. Stats like that, he argued, would make a male player beloved by his coach and teammates. Instead, he said, Clark absorbs constant physical punishment the referees decline to call — he cited a Jason Whitlock analysis estimating dozens of uncalled fouls across two games against a handful of trips to the line — and gets minimal help from teammates who, when she leads the league in assists, pass the ball elsewhere rather than shoot so she won't get credited. He was sharply critical of Fever coach Stephanie White, arguing she takes the ball out of the hands of the best ball-handler on the floor and structures the offense to sideline her, and of the absence of screens for Clark when center Aliyah Boston is in the game. Winn's framing was that jealousy of two straight, white stars drives much of the hostility, and that "the racism is always their trump card." Smith agreed the WNBA had become "political theater," and both cheered the Fever's 113-90 win.
Dave Smith: Flock Cameras and the Surveillance Line
Turning to the Flock license-plate camera system spreading through Arizona, Smith drew a line he said even a law-and-order conservative must hold. "I'm not supportive of Big Brother," he said. "I'm not supportive of an all-seeing eye." A simple license-plate reader he could tolerate; his objection is aggregation — a system that gathers so much data on ordinary people's movements that it becomes, in his phrase, "Big Brother right out of 1984." What troubled him most was disclosure: the cameras' full capabilities, he argued, had leaked out "a little bit at a time" rather than being laid out plainly, and a mandate from the state removes the element of choice a cell phone still offers.
Smith, calling himself a libertarian Republican, acknowledged the technology solves crimes but insisted the method matters: "How you enforce those laws is how you define a free society." He predicted Flock cameras were on their way out and warned that a differently branded successor would follow, urging vigilance about where the surveillance line is drawn. Winn tied it to a pattern she sees — the effort to diminish ICE agents, then law enforcement broadly — while acknowledging the cameras might have utility in a case like the manhunt underway.
Dave Smith: Minneapolis, and a Contested Account of 2020
Smith's most extended stretch revisited the events of 2020 and the prosecutions that followed, delivered as his own firsthand-informed argument. A defensive-tactics trainer who says he has taught officers around the country since 1983 — and who says he has been effectively banned from training in Minnesota over it — Smith argued that the George Floyd case has been mythologized. In his telling, Floyd died of a drug overdose while medically ill, and the knee position shown on camera was a trained scapular hold rather than pressure on the neck. He called the trial of Derek Chauvin and the federal convictions of the other officers a "kangaroo" proceeding in which exculpatory evidence was suppressed and a training lieutenant, he said, testified falsely.
Smith extended the argument to Kim Potter, convicted after mistaking her firearm for a taser, and traced the "anti-law-enforcement" turn to the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Missouri, which he said the media covered without regard to the strong-arm robbery and struggle that preceded it. He pointed listeners to the documentary "The Fall of Minneapolis," produced by former reporter Liz Collin, whose account he said matched calls he received from officers describing a Third Precinct abandoned to arson while police were, in his telling, left unprotected until state troopers arrived. Winn noted Chauvin had nearly been killed in a Pima County facility after his transfer. Both presented the segment as a corrective to what they called a media narrative, and as the reason Winn objects to the elevation of Floyd's memory over what she called the unheralded service of officers like Ramirez.
Dave Smith: Hasan Piker, the DSA, and the Charlie Kirk Anniversary
With the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination approaching on September 10th, Winn and Smith turned to the online commentator Hasan Piker, whom Winn described leading a crowd at his "Fear and Live" tour in a chant — "we are Charlie Kirk, we carry the flame" — over what she said was an AI-generated song, while his co-host laughed on stage. "Whether you like Charlie Kirk or not, you don't mock his assassination," Winn said. "You don't mock his death. He has a family."
Smith's characterization of Piker was blistering: a figure who, he argued, has spoken favorably of violence against business owners and political opponents, is amplified by a media that never asks a follow-up question, and is aligned with DSA candidates whose platform Smith called fully communist. He pointed to Arizona Revised Statutes, which he said bar a party from advocating the government's violent overthrow, and argued the Democratic Party must either disavow the DSA or face being delisted — while faulting Attorney General Kris Mayes for what he called a refusal to enforce the law, whether against the party or against Governor Katie Hobbs over the spending Winn promised to devote a full show to. Both framed the broader movement as one that had moved "from envy to vengeance," and argued its policies fail wherever they govern — pointing to Tucson's one-party council, its troubled schools, and the fare-free bus system Smith called "not free from fear, not free from drugs, not free from crime."
Dave Smith: Data Centers, and the Adults in the Room
Closing on the data centers proposed for the region, Smith rejected what he called purely emotional opposition. If the country wants artificial intelligence, basic internet function, and the ability to compete with China — which he noted is building coal-fired plants at a rapid clip — it needs data centers, he argued, pointing to Loudoun County, Virginia, now among the nation's wealthiest, as full of them. The right questions are about how: he cited reporting that the Marana facility would be low-water and self-contained, and argued for small modular nuclear generation and free-market energy build-out rather than blanket rejection. Winn's suspicion was that much of the opposition is meant "to keep us from moving forward" against Chinese competition.
Smith tied it to local governance, praising the near-complete turnover of the Marana Town Council toward what he called pro-business members over activists, and urging voters to demand "the adult in the room" at every level. Winn closed the show as she has all season — on Juan Ciscomani, targeted by millions in what she called lying ads; on a CD6 electorate she doesn't believe will embrace a Democratic Socialist in JoAnna Mendoza; and on the momentum she sees in Pima County, where Republicans outran the state by 22 points in the primary and, she said, voters are re-registering from Democrat to Republican across the county. "Not on our watch," she said, sending listeners toward a week that would end at the desk of a cabinet secretary. "Stay hydrated."