“The Good Cop”
You know that thing where people defend racist police with the idea of “the good cop”? Well, let me tell you about Webber Samuel Seavey.
The seventh child of Phoebe Harmon and John Seavey, he was born on May 5, 1841, in East Machias, Maine, and would grow to have all the makings of a true American icon. At just 17 years old, Webber Seavey was already working as a lumberjack in Wisconsin. A couple years later he’d be in Colorado, seeking his fortune as a gold miner. Fortunes ever fleeting, Seavey was in Nebraska on New Year’s Day 1862, enlisting in the Union Army.
He quickly climbed the ranks, eventually making it to captain. Captured in battle, Seavey was incarcerated at Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison camp. He was also one of the less than 1 percent of Andersonville prisoners who escaped.
The hero was honorably discharged immediately following the Civil War. For the next several years he worked summers on a Mississippi riverboat and winters clerking in the Wisconsin legislature. In 1873 he made his way to California, where he found his true calling: law enforcement.
Seavey spent several years as the City Marshall of Santa Barbara, and by 1887 the 46-year-old was back in Nebraska, this time as Omaha’s first-ever chief of police.
Nebraska back then was not what you might imagine. In 1890, the leftist People’s Party held the majority in the state’s Congress. Nebraskans only sent People’s Party representatives to the U.S. Congress that year. The party established the legal standard of the eight-hour workday and provided free education with free books for young Nebraskans.
Even the infamous Pinney Farm murders couldn’t break Nebraska’s resolve for justice. In February of 1890, Ed Neal shot the Omaha farm’s elderly caretakers to death, hid their bodies in piles of hay and manure, and stole their livestock. A few months later, Neal was arrested in Kansas City and Chief Seavey was sent to retrieve Neal for trial. Thousands of cheering Omahans greeted Seavey’s return, fugitive in hand.
Neal’s trial lasted eight days and ended with a conviction of murder and sentence of death. Almost a year and a half later, after his final appeal, Neal’s last meal was a porterhouse steak, two fried eggs, mashed potatoes, bread and a cup of coffee. He was then led to the gallows, where he gave a full confession to a crowd of 250 onlookers. The executioner gave the killer a shot of whiskey before pulling the lever. Ed Neal was pronounced dead at 12:32 p.m. on Oct. 9, 1891.
That same day, young husband and father George Smith was arrested. Smith was a Black Omahan accused of sexually assaulting a young white girl. Years later, she admitted the assault never happened — far too little, far too late.
After word spread of Smith’s arrest, a local paper claimed he had killed the girl. Despite Smith’s alibi and a complete lack of evidence, a lynch mob formed. Chief Seavey attempted to intervene. He ordered the mob to disperse. He told them the little girl hadn’t been killed. He even sent for the girl’s father, who explained the same thing to the mob. None of it mattered. It wasn’t really about that.
The white supremacist mob of 15,000 screamed racial slurs as they attacked the Douglas County Courthouse where Smith was being held with chisels and crowbars and sledgehammers. Smith’s unfathomably brutal lynching was well documented. Details and photographs are still widely available. I won’t go into that here other than to say George Smith died shortly after 1 a.m. on Oct. 10, 1891, barely 12 hours after the most civil execution of Ed Neal.
In the following weeks, Chief Seavey arrested over 20 lynch mob leaders, including a city councilor, a journalist, and one of Seavey’s own police captains. But city leaders had put off Smith’s autopsy for 10 days, declaring he’d died of fright, not the lynching. This was successfully used as a legal defense, and not a single person was ever held accountable for murdering George Smith.
Seavey went on to create the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), motivating the creation of the FBI. The IACP currently gives out an annual excellence-in-law-enforcement award in Seavey’s name. By their own standards, he was one of the best to ever do it. But even at the height of his powers, in one of the most compassionate times and places in this country’s history, not only was Chief Seavey incapable of saving an innocent Black life, he couldn’t even bring justice to those who publicly took that life. And he tried.
So, the next time you hear racist policing being defended with the idea of “the good cop,” think of George Smith and what even the great Webber Seavey couldn’t do for him.
Samuel James also writes “Banned Histories of Race in America” at samuelj.substack.com.
