Guests - Dave Smith, Betsy Smith
The morning after a Tucson police recruit was shot to death in his own home, Kathleen Winn gave her Thursday show over to the Smiths — former Pima County Republican chair Dave Smith and, separately, National Police Association spokeswoman Betsy Brantner Smith — with producer Matt Neely filling in. What began as a tribute became a sustained argument about a county where, in the hosts' telling, crime persists because the people in charge have chosen to let it, and about a coming election they cast as the only remedy.
The Killing of Carlos Ramirez
The show opened on the name that had just been released: Carlos Ramirez, 23, a Pima County corrections officer who had transferred to the Tucson Police Department and was 23 weeks into training, scheduled to graduate August 27th. According to the account Winn and Neely relayed, masked men in all-black clothing broke into the Star Valley-area home he shared with his fiancée — herself a Pima County corrections officer — around 6 a.m., fatally shooting him and wounding her, her injuries not considered life-threatening.
Both hosts and Neely stressed a point they felt the early coverage obscured: these were two law enforcement officers, shot in their own home, not a random burglary gone wrong. Jeff Rhodes, the Republican candidate for supervisor in District 5, had gone to the scene and said it carried the marks of a targeted hit rather than an opportunistic robbery — a read Dave Smith, drawing on his law-enforcement background, shared, pointing to the cross-border dimension of organized crime in southern Arizona. Congressman Andy Biggs issued a statement offering prayers for Ramirez's family and hoping his killers would be swiftly brought to justice.
The frustration that would run through the whole show was the silence that followed. Betsy Smith, who spent part of her career as a police public-information officer and now trains departments on media communication, said the case should have been national news and a "dragnet," with the sheriff and chief briefing the public constantly. Instead, she said, there had been no substantive update since the initial afternoon press conference. Her conclusion was blunt and aimed at Sheriff Chris Nanos: that he "fails to communicate with the public," leaving Pima County residents unable to know whether armed home invaders were targeting police officers or striking at random — "either scenario is horrific." She noted it was at least the second fatal home invasion in Tucson in six months and called on the sheriff to do the basic work of the office. Winn's hope, which Smith echoed, was that investigators knew more than they were releasing.
Dave Smith placed the killing inside what he called a snowball of policy failures: a county attorney's office he said leans toward plea deals and soft sentences, city officials who spent 2020 and 2021 casting police as racist, and years of understaffing the Tucson force in the budget. He recalled that Pima County and the city had turned down millions in Operation Stonegarden funding during the first Trump administration — money used in part for drug interdiction — as a political gesture, while accepting COVID relief dollars, and tied that to a fentanyl crisis now compounded by tranq. "As long as you allow crime to persist," he said a friend in the sheriff's office had told him, "it doesn't get better."
Regina Romero's Statement
The hosts turned sharply on Mayor Regina Romero's public response, which Neely read as saying she had "just learned of the tragic passing" of the officer. All three found the wording jarring for a young man who had been murdered — "like he passed away from some sort of an infection or after a long illness," Winn said. Betsy Smith argued the statement reflected either that Romero is "ill prepared to deal with any type of situation" outside her politics or that she knew an arrest might be near. Both contrasted it with what they described as Romero's practice of responding quickly to other incidents — including, after the downtown shooting that wounded nine, appearing with former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords to call for gun restrictions. This time, Winn noted, there was no such statement, because the victim was a police officer.
Smith's broader charge was that Romero cares about officers "except for the ones that protect her," and that Pima County's prosecutor, Laura Conover, is "more interested in putting a cop in jail than she is a bad guy." Both cited the case of a man named Anaya — convicted, they said, on a fast-tracked timeline after intervening to stop a crime, the so-called vigilante case — as their example of misplaced priorities, and Smith argued Romero had tried and failed to manufacture a George Floyd-style episode in Tucson in 2021.
Betsy Smith: The Chucky-Mask Case and the Right of Self-Defense
The conversation with Betsy Smith opened on a case out of Philadelphia she had covered on Newsmax: a young man in a Chucky mask following and approaching female joggers, asking them if they were "ready to die." One victim, Smith said, turned, put up her fists, and told him to stop — at which point he appeared frightened and fled. Smith praised the woman and drew the contrast she wanted: in Philadelphia, where the district attorney is Larry Krasner, whom she called a Soros-backed prosecutor, the women are effectively disarmed and a suspect might face little consequence.
In Arizona, Smith argued, the calculation would be different. As a constitutional-carry state, she said, a man approaching a woman in a horror mask and asking if she is ready to die is inviting a lawful armed response — the mask and the threat alone, under Arizona's justification statute, constituting an assault by placing the victim in fear. Dave Smith, joining the point earlier, dismissed the tendency of commentators to excuse such behavior by the suspect's youth, noting that the Marines who took Tarawa and Iwo Jima were the same age, and that officers are regularly injured by teenage offenders. Both framed the episode as a symptom of a society, in their words, descending into disorder, and drew a line between civilizations that punish predatory behavior and those that rationalize it.
Betsy Smith: Corruption, Spending, and the Case Against Katie Hobbs
Smith turned to what she framed as a season of Democratic scandal. She discussed the FBI's reported search of Congressman Eric Swalwell, whose devices she said were seized, and used it to pivot to Swalwell's friendship with Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, whom she faulted over questions about his use of campaign funds. Both hosts folded in the coming race for CD6, arguing that JoAnna Mendoza — Juan Ciscomani's opponent — reflects the same disregard for rules, and that her defeat in November is essential.
The segment's centerpiece was Governor Katie Hobbs. Smith argued that if Hobbs "gave a damn," she would have immediately offered the Department of Public Safety's investigative division to take over the Ramirez case, since both the sheriff's department and TPD had personnel connected to the victims — and that Hobbs never even acknowledged a murdered officer. Smith then turned to Hobbs's announcement that she was erasing some $429 million in medical debt for roughly 352,000 Arizonans, arguing the money is federal COVID relief — funds other governors returned — being used, in Smith's characterization, to buy votes. Winn added her recurring charge that Hobbs has moved money through state agencies, including the Department of Child Safety and the Land Department, for pet projects and pay-to-play arrangements.
Smith closed with a national example she said illustrates the movement's dishonesty: Gustavo Gordillo, a New York Democratic Socialist leader who, in a recent Fox News interview, was shown to live in a $1.5 million Brooklyn home bought and renovated by his wealthy parents while presenting himself as a blue-collar union man — a union, she said, that had let him go, after which the New York DSA put him on a $95,000 salary. Her larger plea was for Republican politicians to sharpen their messaging: "The economy is going gangbusters," she said, and the party needs to make that case rather than cede the narrative.
The Nanos Communication Failure, Revisited
Returning to the shooting, Betsy Smith deepened her critique of the sheriff's silence with a professional's frame. She recalled her time as director of education for the Law Enforcement Television Network, where a training series by veteran Chicago media figure Rick Rosenthal taught that "the media is going to fill the narrative — you choose the narrative or they do." A capable sheriff or chief, she argued, gets in front of a story, and if information must be withheld for the investigation, says so plainly. The absence of any public appeal — the kind issued reflexively when a child goes missing — struck both hosts as evidence either of dysfunction or of something unusual about the case. Winn noted the joint appearance of Sheriff Nanos and Chief Monica Prieto the day before, and expressed sympathy for the new chief as someone "swimming upstream."
Kathleen Winn: 'We Have a Great Escape Coming'
Winn closed the week on the argument she returns to daily, this time through a memory. In 1980, a University of Arizona senior, she was at Lake Placid for the "Miracle on Ice" — seated, by a security guard's grace, among stunned Russians as the American amateurs beat the Soviet team, then out in the streets amid an eruption of national pride. The lesson she drew was about the possibility of the unprecedented: "If you're willing to have miracles, if you're willing to have the unprecedented, then that's when" they happen.
She applied it to Arizona's roughly 400,000-vote Republican registration advantage, which she said the party must not squander. She pointed to more than 18 Democrats re-registered in Pima County the prior week as evidence of a shift, and made her standard appeal across party lines: a voter needn't agree with Republicans on everything — "the Republicans don't agree with the Republicans on a hundred percent" — but should reject what she called the socialism party. She and Neely returned repeatedly to the concrete local ask: electing Jeff Rhodes to give lone Republican Supervisor Steve Christy a second vote, so motions could be seconded and debated rather than dying for lack of support, and possibly drawing swing votes from members like Rex Scott.
Winn ran through the calendar — ballots mailing around October 6th, arriving days later, returns beginning the week of the 12th — to argue that the persuasion window is now, not October, because so many votes are cast early. She flagged the United Republicans' 2026 candidate reception in Green Valley on October 3rd, which she will emcee, with the statewide ticket and down-ballot candidates invited. She closed on accountability and the eggs: even Attorney General Kris Mayes's price-fixing settlement, she and Neely argued, redirected money to food banks rather than back to the consumers who overpaid — a redistribution dressed as relief. Her sign-off was the season's refrain, now with a deadline attached: research the candidates, vote the whole ballot, and turn Pima County out so the rest of the state takes notice. "We are being held victim by the current politicians," she said, "but I think we can have a great escape come November."