Betty Smothers with her son, Warrick Dunn. |
Every phone call that arrives after midnight is freighted with terrible expectations, and the one received by Warrick Dunn at about 12:30 a.m. on January 7, 1993 bore the worst possible news.
“You need to get to the hospital – quick,” directed the
caller, a Baton Rouge police officer. By the time the 18-year-old Warrick
arrived, his 36-year-old mother, Betty Smothers, had died from gunshot wounds
received during an ambush at a nearby bank. Betty was killed in the line of
duty as a private security guard for a Piggly Wiggly grocery store in an
exceptionally crime-plagued section of the city.
A single mother of six young children and a corporal with
the Baton Rouge Police Department, Smothers supplemented her income through an
immeasurably more dangerous part-time job as a private peace officer. Baton
Rouge at the time was experiencing a prolonged paroxysm of violent crime. As is
always the case, city residents seeking protection for property had to pay for
it themselves, with whatever they had left over after being taxed to pay for
law enforcement “services.”
The night Smothers was murdered, she and store manager Kimen
Lee discussed “the rash of grocery-store stickups in the area,” recalled a
1995 profile of Warrick, a much-lauded High School football and track star who
became a national champion and Heisman contender at Florida State. “Lee
remembers agreeing with Smothers that their nightly routine could easily make
them sitting ducks.”
Smothers, who was permitted to use her patrol car while
moonlighting, habitually entered the one-way drive-through from the “wrong”
direction. This allowed Lee to unlock the night-deposit box through the
passenger-side window and conduct her transaction in seconds. This also meant
that Smothers would be partially shielding her client with her own body – as
she was during the ambush that killed her.
Lee was seriously wounded, but able to operate the vehicle
from the passenger seat. She survived because Smothers, in
keeping with her contract as a private security officer, placed the security of
her client above her own, rather than making “officer safety” the chief
consideration. Given what is known of her character, it is
possible that Smothers would have behaved in a similar fashion while on duty,
even though she
had no legal obligation to do so.
By every available account, Smothers was a kind neighbor and a genuinely heroic mother who was fully invested in caring for her children. Unlike most of her professional colleagues, she was not “badge-heavy”
during her 14 years on the police force, which prompted many who knew her to
speculate that she had been transplanted from Mayberry. Among those she
encountered during that career was a young miscreant named Kevan Brumfield,
whom she caught shoplifting. Rather than handcuffing the thief and pressing
charges, Smothers compelled him to return what he had stolen and urged him to
take advantage of an opportunity most young men in his position wouldn’t
receive.
Brumfield proved to be incorrigible. By the time of that
encounter with Smothers, the teenager had lived in several group homes and been
treated – most likely with the full suite of psycho-toxic drugs – for various
emotional “disorders.” Owing in significant measure to the perverse economic
incentives produced by prohibition, the intellectually stunted and morally
obtuse teenager found a niche as a narcotics dealer and armed robber.
Although Smothers never spoke with Brumfield again, their
paths intersected six years later on the day of her death: He was the one who
fatally shot Sommers during the January 7, 1993 ambush.
Brumfield was convicted of first-degree murder and has spent
two decades on death row. On June
18, the US Supreme Court granted his appeal for a review of that sentence in
light of his claimed “intellectual disability” – a documented I.Q. of 75 and
his history of psychiatric hospitalization. The Court’s
ruling in Atkins
v. Virginia, which was issued following Brumfield’s conviction, held that
the execution of an “intellectually disabled” convict violates the Eighth
Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
In his dissenting
opinion, Clarence Thomas observed that Brumfield’s claim “that his actions
were the product of his disadvantaged background is striking in light of the
conduct of … Smothers’ children following her murder.” Warrick, who had just
celebrated his 18th birthday, essentially became a surrogate father
to his five younger siblings. Following a record-setting football career at
Florida State and then with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL, Warrick devoted
himself to charity, establishing several organizations that provide for the
needs of single mothers and traumatized children.
Betty Smothers’ funeral, which was held at the Centroplex
Exhibition Hall, was attended by 2,000 people. The four-mile-long procession to
the cemetery included hundreds of police cars. The Governor of Louisiana and
Mayor of Baton Rouge spoke at Smothers’ wake, and a city
street in Baton Rouge now bears her name.Friends and neighbors were eager to help Betty's mother raise her orphaned children. The death benefits provided to Betty as a 14-year employee of the department provided her children with material security of the kind rarely enjoyed by the spouses and children of private security operatives who are killed on the job.
Smothers died as a private
peace officer defending property from aggression, rather
than as a State functionary exercising the government’s monopoly on violence. The
government law enforcement agency that employed Smothers sought to bask in the reflected
glory of the heroism she displayed in a significantly more dangerous
occupation.
The early and mid-1990s were an unusually dangerous time for
many Baton Rouge residents, but the police department that supposedly protected
the public didn’t expose itself to those dangers. Betty Smothers was
one of 74 Baton Rouge murder victims in 1993. In a single year, the “civilian”
murder toll was more than four times greater than the number of police officers
who have been killed in the entire history of the Baton Rouge PD.
Over the past 104 years, a total of eighteen
Baton Rouge PD officers have died on duty. More than one quarter
of them were killed in motorcycle or automobile accidents. Betty Smothers was
the only member of the department to die through violence or an accident during
a sixteen-year period -- 1988 to 2004. Her
name is included in the roster of “fallen” Baton Rouge police officers
despite the fact that she was not acting as a police officer when she was
murdered.
As Nietzche famously said, everything the State says is a
lie, and everything it has is stolen. In this case, the State’s coercive caste,
seeking to add undeserved luster to its institutional image, has stolen the
valor of a private peace officer.
Private security officers are made out of the same flawed
material as the rest of humanity. Unlike government enforcement operatives,
however, they can’t take refuge in “qualified immunity” when they harm innocent
people, or allow them to come to harm through neglect or malice. Private peace
officers confront much greater occupational risks than their
government-employed counterparts. They are also dramatically less inclined
toward violence than American police officers, who kill much more promiscuously than law
enforcement officers in other countries.
Examining figures compiled by the Washington Post, the
Guardian of London, and the watchdog organization Killed By Police, professor
Edward Peter Stringham points out that “the police-against-citizen kill rate”
in the U.S. “is more than 145 per 100,000.” The overall homicide
rate, by way of contrast, is 5 per 100,000.
The two most violent countries in the world, he continues,
are Venezuela and Honduras, where the national homicide rates are 54 and 90 per
100,000, respectively. Both of those countries are subject to State Department
travel advisories.
“If you are not comfortable vacationing in those countries,
it is little wonder why so many Americans are uncomfortable with police who
kill at a rate more than 1.5 and 2.5 times the homicide rates” of those two
extraordinarily violent countries, he notes.
Stringham, the Davis Professor for Economic Organizations
and Innovation at Trinity College, is the author of Private
Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life, which
he
recently discussed in an interview with the indispensable Dr. Tom Woods. One
of the key insights encoded in the title of that book is that governance does not require political government. One application of that
principle is the private provision of security, a practice that exists because
of the consummate failure of government police agencies to provide their
advertised service.
Every monopoly offers an inferior product at higher cost
than a competitive market would bear, and as Professor Stringham points out,
this is emphatically true of government policing.
In San Francisco at the time of Betty Smothers’ murder, the Patrol Special Police, a consortium
of independent private security companies, “charged $25 to $30 an hour,
depending on the particular service, while off-duty public officers charged up
to $58 an hour of security service.”
“The need for private security is greatest for low-income
families, since they are victimized by crime more often than other income
groups,” Stringham
observes in a paper co-written with Kai Jaeger. “All
too often, regulations price low-income families out of the market for private protection….
Some cities only allow off-duty government police officers to patrol for
private security firms, for example. Since hiring police officers costs two to
four times as much as non-police private security guards, this type of
regulation makes private security prohibitively expensive.”
Government intervention thus artificially prices private
security beyond the reach of the people most desperately in need of that
service. This is a very lucrative arrangement for police officers.
In San Francisco, write Stringham and Jaeger, roughly half
of the police department “work off-duty, earning an extra $9.5 million.” That’s
a sizeable and well-connected constituency seeking to insulate itself from
purely private competition. The “Patrol Specials,” who are descended from
patrols created in the 1840s to protect miners and merchants, are the only
private security company allowed to operate in San Francisco under the city
charter.
Predictably, that relationship corrupted the organization.
Although it has continued to provide contract-based protection for property
owners, it was also given a limited role in carrying out police functions, such
as issuing citations and enforcing city regulations – and found itself on the
receiving end of several lawsuits arising from abuses of the kind such behavior
entails. Rather than expanding the use of private security patrols, the city
administration has treated the Patrol Specials as the extinction-bound remnant
of a less enlightened time.
“Despite all the good we do and how effective we are, the
police union doesn’t want us around,” complained
Patrol Special Police Chief Alan Byard in 2010. The unions have all but killed
their competition: By 2014, fewer
than 10 active Special Patrol officers remained.
Critics of private security companies frequently complain
that “rent-a-cops” are insufficiently regulated and inadequately trained.
Government police organizations are state-regulated, but – as we are constantly
reminded – they are also entirely unaccountable to the public. The work quality
of private security operatives is variable, but in a competitive market a
contractor or company that is corrupt or inept won’t survive for very long.
Furthermore,
in some states – such as Arkansas and Louisiana – the professional standards of
private security officers are much higher than those of government-employed law
enforcement officers.
In Louisiana, the state government requires
security officers to receive a modest amount of classroom instruction
regarding legal and ethical issues, use of non-lethal force, “limits of force,”
emergency medical care “including First Aid and CPR,” and firearms training
prior to being certified. They are then required to undergo an annual refresher
course in “security training” and re-qualify with their firearms.
By way of contrast, a Louisiana resident can become a
government-employed police officer without any training or certification
whatsoever, and continue in that occupation on a part-time basis without ever attending
a POST academy. Some police departments in small rural towns employ full-time
officers who are entirely untrained – and, owing to “qualified immunity,”
selectively exempt from the criminal laws that private security officers must
obey.
The government-imposed distortions in Louisiana’s security market probably made moonlighting as a security guard economically irresistible to Betty Smothers, a single mother seeking to buy a home for her large family. Betty's day job as a cop notwithstanding, her conduct the night she was murdered suggests that she was probably too good for government “work."
Notes and asides
A few weeks ago I mentioned that our family is facing eviction after our landlord walked away from the mortgage (this is the second time we've experienced this over the past six years). Our "hard deadline" to vacate is this Thursday (June 25). We haven't been able to find a new home here in Payette that is large enough for our family and within our severely limited budget -- a situation that isn't uncommon in the Idaho rental market.
We are planning a move to Homedale, a small town in Owyhee County, but our new home isn't yet available. Any financial support you can provide to help us with our moving expenses would be tremendously appreciated.Thank you so much.
Dum spiro, pugno!
We are planning a move to Homedale, a small town in Owyhee County, but our new home isn't yet available. Any financial support you can provide to help us with our moving expenses would be tremendously appreciated.Thank you so much.
Dum spiro, pugno!
3 comments:
Mr. Grigg, I e-mailed you a few weeks ago about another matter, but I guess you didn't receive it,.
I hope your financial situation improves, but in that regard I have a piece of advice. I know that blogging about the police state can be fun, and a noble cause to 'inform others,' (although one could argue you're preaching to the choir) but if your enterprise can not even pay your bills, perhaps it's time to seek out a business where you can support your family- or, if that's not feasible, get a job as an employee somewhere to help pay your bills.
I've been writing for number of years and make decent money at it for a side gig, but I have my main business which supports my family. I've been self employed since I was 20, and when my first business started to falter after 20+ years, I went into another business, which is thriving, thank God.
So, this post is not meant to be snarky or demeaning. I'm saying its time to buck up. and if you're self employed, that most likely will still allow you the time to research and write on your blog, while taking care of what REALLY matters, your family's financial well being.
by the way, one other tip- On google adsense, youtube videos vs writing, I have found that the majority of income is generated by youtubes, not writing, it appears at about 70- 30 (videos vs writing) even though I prefer writing, videos seem to rake in the cash better.
So if you don't have a YT channel, maybe its time to get one.
H.G., even if snark had been your objective, snarkiness wedded with constructive criticism can be very useful.
Please forgive me for not responding to your email, which -- as it happens -- I can't remember at the moment. If you would send it again I promise to give it immediate attention. Thank you.
First off, you are completely incorrect that Officer Smothers was working as a security guard. When you wear the uniform, use your patrol car you are "on duty" even if you are working an "off duty detail." So if you are killed it's in the line of duty, period.
Dan
retired LEO Florida
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