Data on Race and Police Shootings

Guest: Ben Montgomery, Reporter, Tampa Bay Times In the past three years, fatal encounters between police and unarmed black men sparked protests across the country. Were these just a handful of tragic but isolated incidents, as law enforcement officials claimed? Or were the shooting deaths of Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and Walter Scott evidence of a larger pattern of racial discrimination by police?  When Tampa Bay Times investigative reporter Ben Montgomery set out to answer that question in Florida, he quickly realized it wouldn’t be easy; no one—not even the FBI—was keeping track of police shootings in the country’s third-largest state. This is also true in most states around the country. So Montgomery and a team at the Tampa Bay Times decided they would. It took more than two years, but now they’re done and he shares his findings with us.