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Conversation With Tampa Bay Times Journalist Examining "Why Cops Shoot"

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Shootings by police have dominated the news nationwide in the past several years. But there are no national statistics on who got shot and who did the shooting. So the Tampa Bay Times went through records from all of Florida's four hundred law enforcement agencies, counting every time someone was injured or killed from a shooting in the six years ending in 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. There was no gun, no knife, no vehicle. And half of those were black.

The research went into a series published this month called "Why Cops Shoot."

From our sister state WUSF, Steve Newborn talks with reporter Tampa Bay Times Ben Montgomery, who came up with some interesting numbers.

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