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Times Investigation Reveals 'Why Cops Shoot'

Tampa Bay Times

There are no national or state statistics that track police shootings.  But a Tampa Bay Times investigation has collected records from Florida's four hundred law enforcement agencies... counting every time someone was shot or killed by an officer between 2009 and 2014.

One of their main findings: 40 percent of people shot in Florida are black, while African-Americans make up around 15 percent of the state's population.

Nearly a fifth of the people shot — 156 — were unarmed; no gun, no knife, no vehicle. And half of those were black.

WUSF's Steve Newborn talks with reporter Ben Montgomery about the investigation.

The investigation is also the subject of a recent podcast episode of Radiolab.

Steve Newborn is a WUSF reporter and producer at WUSF covering environmental issues and politics in the Tampa Bay area.
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