T.J. Smith recalls laying on the floor as a kid and listening to the Orioles games with his grandad.
“It’s crazy how life comes full circle,” he said. “I used to listen to baseball on WBAL, and now I work here. My grandmother would listen to talk radio. I asked her why she listened to that mess. She’d tell me if I didn’t like it, I could get my own house.”
Smith said with radio, he’s always felt a relationship with the news anchor. Like they were in his home.
“With the six-o’clock news, it was like having dinner with them every night. Like they were in our living room.”
Smith mostly grew up with his grandparents.
“My grandfather is like a hero to me,” Smith said. “He created a model train platform. It was big. He modeled the areas around the track like real places in the city. We’d play with the trains and listen to the radio. My cousin and I were a grade apart at the same school. We’d come home together to my grandparent’s house. My granddad had a speaker system in the basement with a microphone. We’d record newscasts. Talk about what we did in school.”
Smith said his grandfather had a police scanner so he could get all the breaking news.
“My favorite part of the newscasts was doing the weather. I never dreamed I’d be on the radio. It was my life’s dream to be a dad.”
Smith comes to radio broadcasting by a very unusual route. He earned his BS and MS at Johns Hopkins in leadership and management. Later, he earned an MA from Washington State in strategic communications.
Smith has worked with the Baltimore Police Department as a sworn law enforcement officer and a sworn commander. He was a civilian chief of communications in Baltimore, sworn in in Anne Arundel County.
Now he’s at WBAL NewsRadio 1090/FM 101.5 in Baltimore. Smith, a Baltimore native, hosts weekdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and has been a familiar voice to the WBAL audience as a guest. He used to go on WBAL with C4 (Clarence Mitchell, IV) another Baltimore native.
“I’d met C4 many years ago,” Smith said. “We both said we wanted to do something more regarding crime.”
What they started was a segment called BPD Case Files.
“We’d highlight cold cases and bring in family members and talk with them,” Smith said. “We were able to bring the stories to a different level of media attention. To this day, there are still people that ask about the show. I’ve been offered some encouragement by listeners to bring it back. The shows would pull at the heartstrings.”
Smith was the spokesperson for the Baltimore City Police Department from 2015 to 2018. He’s seen his share of heartache and pain. Smith and I talked about some recent crimes in the news. He said when it comes to murder specifically, most murder suspects are known to the victim.
“There’s almost always some pre-existing relationship between a victim and a suspect,” Smith said. “Some problems may be related to beef that might have just occurred. You can feel when something is wrong in most domestic cases. One thing about certain suspects is the fact they’re narcissists. Many think they can talk their way out of any situation.”
Smith said with people like recently convicted Alex Murdaugh in South Carolina, people think they’re so smart they feel they can outsmart the system.
“The fact is they aren’t so smart,” Smith said. “They almost always leave trails. A similar story is with the dentist in Colorado that killed his wife. He Googled to see if arsenic could be detected in an autopsy. You see that a lot in domestic cases. Stupid stuff.”
His new show on WBAL started last month, and Smith looks forward to delivering straight talk and sharing his opinions based on his experience working in government and law enforcement.
The city of Baltimore is a character in its own right. Smith said since the HBO show The Wire aired, the city has endured even more problems.
“Some say the show was too sensational,” Smith explained. “I say The Wire didn’t go far enough. Since the show ended we’ve had another mayor go to jail. We’ve had another police commissioner resign and go to jail.”
Throughout his career and different jobs, Smith said he was allowed to say and communicate in a way that spoke to Baltimore.
“People meet me and say ‘I’m sorry, I’m talking like I know you’. I tell them not to apologize. I talk on the radio the way I’m talking to you now. It doesn’t matter if I’m at a press conference or on the phone, I’m the same guy.”
He said he gets calls from people saying a politician or city official copied something he’d said.
“My message to that person is to say thank you,” Smith said. “I don’t have an ego. I don’t care. Whatever is best. I like to be known as a mayoral whisperer. I will indirectly suggest certain things and at times they will come to fruition. I work for results for something other than praise. I’ve always been a team player.”
Working with the BPD was extremely demanding and emotionally taxing. Smith said he’s moved on from that kind of life, the hustling all the time.
“I have a 10- year-old beautiful boy, and I intend to spend time with him,” Smith said. “Just the other day we took the train to D.C. with our bikes. When we got to the city, we must have ridden 20 miles.”
Smith said his son will hear a story on the radio about a murder and ask him about it.
“He once said to me, ‘I’m glad you didn’t become mayor.’ He didn’t want me to be involved in all the grisly stuff.”
Smith jokingly told his listeners he knew he’d only been on the air only a short time but took a day off.
“I told them it was spring break, and I was going to spend time with my son. I hear people complain about parents not spending time with their kids, I did just that. Being a dad means everything to me.”
He ran for mayor in 2020 but lost. He won’t run again.
“All the momentum, all the fire to run for office was stopped in the midst of COVID,” he said. “When everybody philosophically seemed to slow down and reflect.”
When he talked to WBAL about the possible show, Smith said his family was his primary concern.
“When we had discussions, I told them the midday slot was the only shift I could take. I take my son to school and coach him in sports. I don’t have to worry about being on call. Any member of the media reading this knows what I’m saying. Who the hell wants to go out to cover a snowstorm? I’d go out in those kinds of circumstances and hated it. I wanted to be home in front of the fireplace, having hot chocolate, sledding down a hill.”
Relatively recently, Smith took a job as a substitute teacher in Baltimore, mostly as a new challenge.
“It was the most eye-opening experience I’ve ever had. Teachers would talk to me and say they knew I’d seen a lot of stuff. I would stop them and say I couldn’t imagine doing anything more extraordinary than being a teacher. I hadn’t seen anything. I hadn’t dealt with children on that level for a long time. I was forced to accept some things and negotiate some others. It was quite challenging.”
Smith said whatever authority he thought he had as spokesperson was humbled quickly when he saw how hard teachers work. What they have to deal with.
“I miss some of the kids but not all of them,” he said. “You can see the promise in them. I gave it my best shot. There was a need, and I had the time.”
His mother retired from teaching in 2020. Smith said for public schools to succeed there need to be formative changes.
“Here’s the reality,” Smith said. “If we allow teachers the opportunity to teach, and discipline the kids who are going to be disruptive, we’d have better public schools. If we’re going to allow students to run the asylum, that’s going to be to the detriment of 75 percent of kids who are not causing problems.”
Smith said armed guards in schools could be effective, but arming teachers is ridiculous.
“More realistically we need to invest in more technology. It’s sad to say that steel bulletproof doors that lock down immediately might have to be considered. I think the Nashville shooting was handled well. The Uvalde situation was just the opposite. I think they should charge the Uvalde police department with dereliction of duty.”
Smith said there is an inherent right for an officer to disobey an order.
“I’ve been in a situation where it wasn’t a shooter but a stabber in an office building. You have to understand the moment. Make a plan quickly. Somebody in Uvalde should have broken ranks. When I was in uniform, I never thought as I went into a situation that I might get killed. I never thought that going in. I believed if I followed the training I was going to be okay.”
Jim Cryns writes features for Barrett News Media. He has spent time in radio as a reporter for WTMJ, and has served as an author and former writer for the Milwaukee Brewers. To touch base or pick up a copy of his new book: Talk To Me – Profiles on News Talkers and Media Leaders From Top 50 Markets, log on to Amazon or shoot Jim an email at jimcryns3_zhd@indeedemail.com.
