San Francisco ventriloquist cop who patrolled with dummy dies at 85

San Francisco Chronicle

When officer Brendan O’Smarty arrived at a San Francisco crime scene, he was always ready to defuse a tense situation because he came with his partner, Bob Geary, a beat patrolman with a feel for the street.

It was a classic good cop/bad cop setup. O’Smarty played the good cop, and Geary played the bad cop. What made the partnership unique was that Geary was a ventriloquist and O’Smarty was a dummy.

The combination made Geary a minor celebrity who went on TV talk shows with his uniformed puppet sidekick.

The residents of San Francisco loved it, as 68,000 of them proved by voting for a successful 1993 initiative that allowed Geary to keep working with O’Smarty after police brass tried to break up the partnership. Though Geary rubbed some fellow police officers and most of the police brass the wrong way with his attention-seeking behavior, he was four times decorated with the Bronze Medal of Valor in a career that ran for 31 years at the San Francisco Police Department.

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I encountered Geary and O’Smarty in North Beach when I lived in San Francisco. It was an immediate WTF? moment you'd only expect in San Francisco, but then you understood right away -- Geary calmed down a situation with talk instead of the threat of violence. I voted "yes" for the initiative.

He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma seven years ago and died Jan. 26.