What’s the real story behind the badge in Smith County? Join us as we delve into the pressing issues of crime and law enforcement with Smith County Sheriff Larry Smith. With four decades of experience, Smith unravels the complex realities on the ground, especially the worrying growth of fentanyl trafficking and the strategies being developed to counteract this growing menace, such as the Texas Anti-Gang Center initiative.
Smith candidly addresses the trials of overcrowding, staff recruitment and retention. If you’ve ever wondered about the workings of the law enforcement system, this conversation is a behind-the-scenes look into the gritty everyday operations.
MIKE LANDESS: He’s serving his third term as Smith County Sheriff, and on his birthday last May, Larry Smith announced he was going for a fourth. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio. Smith County Sheriff Larry Smith is our guest today. Welcome.
LARRY SMITH: Thank you, Mike.
LANDESS: Now you’ve been in law enforcement for nearly four decades. Don’t you ever get tired of chasing bad guys?
SMITH: Mike, I don’t know what I would do if it wasn’t for law enforcement. It’s been my life for 47 years, and I enjoy it. I feel like I’m accomplishing something by being in law enforcement, and I’ll be here as long as the people want me.
LANDESS: Now, what drew you to law enforcement in the first place?
SMITH: I wish I could tell you that. It’s kind of a long story, and I’ll try to make it as short as I can. When I was a junior in high school my mother wanted me to apply for West Point. And I knew when I was in junior high, I wanted to be in law enforcement. But just to appease my mother, I went ahead and applied, knowing that I wouldn’t get in West Point. And so, one day my sister came from the mailbox, and I had not one, but two, letters of appointment to West Point. One from Wright Patman, and Rep. Wright Patman and Senator Lloyd Bentsen.
LANDESS: I hope you have those framed somewhere.
SMITH: I have the article framed. But I went as far as going to Barksdale Air Force Base to get my physical, knowing I didn’t want to go, knowing I wanted to go in law enforcement. It took me about two weeks to get enough courage to tell my mother that’s not what I wanted to do, and she wouldn’t talk to me for a while. But it worked out very well. I’ve had a great law enforcement career. If it were to stop today, I’ve had a great career. It couldn’t have been any better. And I’m not sorry I didn’t do it. I think I’m where I was supposed to be.
LANDESS: I think you are, too. What’s the biggest crime issue that we face here in Smith County, and how is your department addressing it?
SMITH: The biggest crime I guess would be, if not the drug distribution itself, it would be directly related to that. Fentanyl is big now. I just returned from San Diego to a Southwest Border Conference-Law Enforcement Conference- and Fentanyl is coming across the border like nobody’s business. And we’ve had at least one, if not two or three, fentanyl-related deaths of young people here in Smith County alone. And it’s all across the nation, and it’s got to stop.
LANDESS: It’s just out of control.
SMITH: And what we’re doing to address that is-Gov. (Greg) Abbott, several years back, started this program called “TAG” – Texas Anti-Gang Center – and we were the seventh one — seventh, where the fiduciary agency Smith County Sheriff’s Office is, and we got the grant about 3 years ago, and we were the seventh Texas Anti-Gang Center. And what that does? It puts federal, state and local law enforcement under one roof and one building, working together in concert with one another to curtail the gangs, the drugs and everything related to that.
LANDESS: That program is going on right here and Tyler right now?
SMITH: For 3 years now, and it’s been a game-changer.
LANDESS: Tell me about the gang issue. I mean we talk about, we’ve heard a great deal about the border being so porous and that some gangs realize that it is porous. South American, central American gangs are coming across. Have you seen any evidence of that, specifically here in East Texas?
SMITH: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. The cartels have family members all over the United States now. And we’ve had a deputy that we had to arrest ourselves who had associated with the gangs and ran some data for them through our law enforcement computers that we’re not supposed to do and recently got convicted of that.
LANDESS: You’re watching this very carefully. I had the privilege of moderating a panel on drugs here at the UT Tyler campus years ago. You were one of the panelists. I’ve often quoted something you said on that day. It took a little bit of back at the moment because it was so transparent. I said something about the war on drugs, and you retorted there was never a war on drugs. What did you mean then? And where are we now?
SMITH: Well, the federal government, and I’m not playing a blame game with it — blame — the federal government has always said, going back to when I went to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which was in 1987, when I left the sheriff’s office in Gregg County after being there for 11 years and making my way up to captain of the criminal investigation division, I went to the Drug Enforcement Administration. And that’s when most of the cocaine and the illicit drugs, the heroin, was coming from into Miami, Florida, from Bogota, Colombia. Well, when the open borders, the porous borders of Mexico open, wide open, that’s where they come through now, along with, believe it or not, the conference I just came from said, there’s 138 different nationalities coming through the southern border, that have been documented.
LANDESS: So when we talk about there not being a war on drugs, is it because it’s just so enormous, and it’s just so ephemeral, hard to get your arms around and handle?
SMITH: I would attribute it to politics. The politicians in Washington, D.C., mostly, want it to look like there’s a war on drugs, but they don’t want to cut out all the stops to do what needs to be done to stop the illicit drugs. The border’s got to be closed first. That’s an absolute must. If you’re going to have a war on drugs, you cannot have an open, porous border.
LANDESS: We spoke with Smith County Judge Neal Franklin a few months back, and we asked him about the challenges at the Smith County Jail. He told us that the issues of overcrowding and recruiting and retaining personnel are things that most county sheriffs have to deal with these days. Why is that?
SMITH: Well, it seems, after everybody blames everything on COVID now, and that’s the, I guess, the common denominator, we started seeing the rise in population in the jail. We were overpopulated. We had to go and pull out all the stops and find somewhere to send some of the inmates. We did that. Now we’re down. We’ve got a cushion of maybe 250 now, which is a good place to be for the size jail we have. But quite frankly, we never, ever since I’ve been sheriff and before I was sheriff, that jail has not been staffed with a relief factor. A relief factor means that if somebody takes off sick, they have to go to court, they have to do this or that, or they want to take a personal time off or vacation time off, you have to have somebody to fill in that position and not somebody that’s already worked. You have to pull in to work overtime to fill in that position. They’ve always been there. What I want to do when we get to single digits of openings, when we’re right at about 38 now, once we get there, I’m going to go to the commissioner’s court and to Judge Franklin, and we need to hire those personnel.
LANDESS: And the commissioner’s court, and your conversations with Judge Neal Franklin indicate that he would be supportive of helping you get where you need to be?
SMITH: Oh, absolutely. I want to make it clear this is a completely new commissioner’s court, except for one commissioner. So, we’re talking to a new judge, a new court, and they’ve been very supportive of what needs to be done in the Smith County jail.
LANDESS: Our guest has been veteran Smith County Sheriff Larry Smith. To hear this interview again or to share it, go to KVUT.org. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio.
(Transcripts are automatically generated and may contain phonetic spellings and other spelling and punctuation errors. Grammar errors contained in the original recording are not typically corrected.)