Radiolab - Shots Fired: Part 1

A couple years ago, Ben Montgomery, reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, started emailing every police station in Florida. He was asking for any documents created - from 2009 to 2014 - when an officer discharged his weapon in the line of duty. He ended up with a six foot tall stack of reports, pictures, and press clippings cataloging the death or injury of 828 people by Florida police. Jad and Robert talk to Ben about what he found, crunch some numbers, and then our reporter Matt Kielty takes a couple files off Ben's desk and brings us the stories inside them - from a network of grief to a Daytona police chief. And next week, we bring you another, very different story of a police encounter gone wrong. Produced and reported by Matt Kielty For the full presentation of Ben Montgomery's reporting please visit the Tampa Bay Times' 'Why Cops Shoot?" We can't recommend it highly enough. Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that in reporter Ben Montgomery's six years of Florida data there were, on average, 130 people shot and killed each year. Police officers did indeed shoot 130 people per year, on average, but only half of those shootings were fatal. The audio has been adjusted to reflect this fact. Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Duration: 58m
Broadcast on: 17 Mar 2017
Audio Format: other

A couple years ago, Ben Montgomery, reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, started emailing every police station in Florida.

He was asking for any documents created - from 2009 to 2014 - when an officer discharged his weapon in the line of duty. He ended up with a six foot tall stack of reports, pictures, and press clippings cataloging the death or injury of 828 people by Florida police.

Jad and Robert talk to Ben about what he found, crunch some numbers, and then our reporter Matt Kielty takes a couple files off Ben's desk and brings us the stories inside them - from a network of grief to a Daytona police chief.

And next week, we bring you another, very different story of a police encounter gone wrong.

Produced and reported by Matt Kielty

For the full presentation of Ben Montgomery's reporting please visit the Tampa Bay Times' 'Why Cops Shoot?" We can't recommend it highly enough.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that in reporter Ben Montgomery's six years of Florida data there were, on average, 130 people shot and killed each year. Police officers did indeed shoot 130 people per year, on average, but only half of those shootings were fatal. The audio has been adjusted to reflect this fact.

Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.

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Hey, I'm Chad Applemoren. Hi, Robert Krollich. He's a radio lab, and today we're going to start this show with a fellow named Ben Montgomery, a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times. He's a guy we've had on the show before. Ben, say something. Hi. Hi, Ben. Hi, Ben. Okay. I think it's good. All right. We just want to know from you, like what are you guys doing? How are you doing it? What are you thinking? I'll start at the beginning. Yeah, start at the beginning. Tell us what you're doing. So after the Mike Brown shooting in Ferguson, there was growing outrage tonight after an unarmed African-American teenager was shot and killed when that became a national story. There was a lot of belly icking in the press. How many people do we see killed in the United States about by the police each year? How no one keeps accurate statistics. There's currently no national statistics on police shootings, law enforcement officer involved shootings, and it struck me at the time that, like, what we react to is all anecdotal. You know, once in a while, one of these things will catch fire. To me, you're right. Jason Harrison, Sam DeBose, and we'll become sort of a national story. And I personally was having trouble like processing that. Like, number one, is there, is it trending one way or the other? Are police shooting more black people than white people? Just very simply. The problem is we don't know. We have no idea because nobody tracks these FBI doesn't. State agencies don't, for the most part. So that doesn't exist somewhere within the police department itself. In the police department, it does on the local level. However, it doesn't exist in any accurate way by a broader agency. And I could tell you how many purse snatching there were in Florida in 2011 using the FBI numbers or the numbers submitted to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. But I can't tell you how many times police shot somebody. Now, there have been a couple of organizations that have tried to keep track nationally. But everything that's done so far is incomplete. You know, because most of those, you know, like the Guardian has an online database, most of them rely on media reports. So they're only really keeping track of the ones that sort of hit the public consciousness. That's right. So Ben and his editors thought, let's do something that's more complete. Let's do something that's unprecedented. So first thought he had Florida. It's the third biggest state demographics are pretty similar to the rest of the country. And Florida has wonderful public records laws. Legally, it's easier to get information in Florida than in a lot of other places. And so, Ben sat down and started emailing every single police precinct in the entire state of Florida. I think it's 388 emails asking for five years worth of paper. Any paper generated when an officer fired a firearm and someone was injured or killed as a result of that shooting. Now, this involves a year of work, hounding police departments, getting lawyers involved. This is a massive thing that involved probably no less than 100 people. But eventually, thank you, sir. Ben put together the most comprehensive police shooting database that we know of. I want to show back.

A while back, we sent our producer Matt kilty down to the Tampa Bay Times. Oh, is this them right here? To check it out. Yeah. How many how many documents do you think you have sitting on this desk?

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