Before we start this podcast contains some tape that's described some pretty graphic violence We want to let you know that before we get going You're listening to radio lab ready from WNY Hey, I'm Jad Apple Ron. I'm Robert Krollich radio lab today We're gonna start this show with a fellow me bin Montgomery a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times He's a guy we've had on the show before and say something. Hi Okay, I think I'm good. All right, where 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. Yes, start at the beginning Tell us what you're doing.
So after the Mike Brown shooting in Ferguson 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. It's me or right Becomes 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 or please shooting more black people in white people just very simply?
Yeah, 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 really that 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 can tell you how many person-at-chings there were in Florida in 2011 using the FBI numbers or the numbers 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 cuz 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 hits a 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 you had Florida So 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 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 I said 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 How many police departments getting lawyers involved?
This was a massive thing that involved probably no less than a hundred people, but eventually Thank you, sir Ben put together the most comprehensive police shooting database that we know of I want to show that While back we sent our producer Matt Keelty down to the Tampa Bay Times Oh, is this them right here to check it out? Yeah, how many how many documents you think you have sitting on this desk? It's probably 5,000 pages. I have a stack of paper that's about as tall as me six feet tall We've got them broken down by county, but you can see uh So a B Bay County, Boca Raton, Boynton Beach All the way through the alphabet They basically just have all these middle folders with tons of papers and I'm spread across an entire desk It's a combination of use of force reports, civil court records and media clippings that represent 831 Shootings.
I hope every shooting in the state of Florida in six years time 2009 to 2014 So we did was go through all this material scrape each of those reports for every bit of information that we could yet that we thought was useful Circumstantial stuff did involve a SWAT team that involved an armed suspect was there a chase All the demographic information for the firing officer or officers and the people are here by those bullets Then we thought let's like learn from these let's see how we can compile the data and build a database and um You know, hopefully draw some conclusions some lessons some solutions This is all going to go into it sort of a giant online database at the Tampa Bay Times website Hopefully other organizations and other states will start to do the same perhaps even one day We'll have a national agency that keeps track of this stuff in any case in the meantime Here's some of the things that Ben found initially some of it, you know kind of surprised us Well, the biggest sort of counterintuitive line in this the numbers are flat He says if you look at the numbers what you see year after year after year the numbers are state steady About 130 people shot by police every year Which seems odd because you know past couple of years these videos that go viral and It makes it seem like this is a new and intense problem. The numbers show that that doesn't seem to be the case We also broke these down into category And he says you know what you see like on the most basic level Are that about a third of the police shooting cases involve someone on the other side who is quote mentally unstable This is a case We're not taking a guess at whether the person is mentally unstable These are cases in which there's some evidence in the report that the person has been diagnosed mentally ill Maybe off their meds at the time of the shooting and in that category Ben says they found a surprising number of cases They call suicide by cop which is where somebody who's usually mentally ill Apparently trying to get themselves shot intentionally person is in view of the police standing on a porch standing behind a screen door And raises a weapon toward the police either a weapon or or what they want the police to think is a weapon So it's called i'm going to kill myself, but i'm going to make you do it to me Right and that's considered a suicide attempt because they know they're going to get shot as an attempt to invite the shooting That's right. This is something that people have covered police apparently know quite well You know they're the news briefs that you see once or twice a week But it was news to us I mean clearly police are now like the de facto front line and dealing with mental illness in this country But when it got to Ben's central question, what do the numbers say about race? I think i would start with the fact that um there i'm not sure it was so surprising that a 40 percent of people shot by police are black And that is uh that is out of whack with uh the florida demographics.
What is the percentage of African-Americans in florida? It's not 40 percent. It's more like 17 That's right, which means ultimately that if you're a black person in florida You are four times as likely to be shot by police than if you're white It doesn't tell us much right now, but the breakdown between fatalities for the same demographics And as we sat there going through this particular set of numbers 50.9 percent were carrying a firearm 9 percent had a blade uh 70 percent involved some form of resisting arrest You know and we talked about numerous times over two years, you know drilling down on those numbers And as we were doing that 50.9 percent, you know, it was weird I started to feel like, you know, I'm really glad that we have these numbers finally that itself is a good thing But I'm further down 91 of the five 70 or 16 the numbers themselves don't really get you very far 60 1% from where you're here. It's just like yeah, this is Only one ultimately limited way of knowing the problem.
Yeah, I mean I mean what I guess it means like that. I don't know it's back to where we were and why we just wanted to start this So I'm still just moved by the single case individual cases And it's hard to remember that each of these is you know, I mean they're all written in this Deployment investigations revealed that ASPD officer Matthew Fowler received a call in this staccato sterile police speak Fowler approached department 255 who was confronted by white male later identified as Anthony Schiles Armed with a knife at apartment 255 Every one of these every report is at least one human life Someone was either, you know, more often than not gravely injured or killed So we have on this table the investigation of the deaths or severe injury of 831 people So what we decided to do in collaboration with the Tampa Bay times is we grabbed a couple of folders right off Ben Montgomery's giant folder stack to follow wherever those stories might lead Matt guilty and Ben traveled around Florida on a few different occasions talking to the people behind those statistics You heard and over the next couple of weeks. We're gonna bring you two of those stories. This podcast is the first Um, Matt, I guess I'll just turn it over to you.
Yep. Okay, uh, so day one. Yeah, where was this place again? The land The land Florida was down Hot probably ladies little town on the east coast of Florida and we were there because Ben I found out about this event.
Do you know what the thing's called? It's the third the cause celebration the third anniversary celebration of the police killing of Marlon brown Okay, and this event was being held at the west volusius shrine club shrine club shrine club like shriners like the shriners I'm just gonna walk in and introduce myself So I walk in and you know, it's like a small meeting center Not only the floor of fluorescent lights and the first thing I noticed to be honest is we're about 20 people in here Mostly black. We're just knowing about talking But on the walls of this place the photos of all the shriners run the length of this wall It's just like portraits of old white men wearing fez hats who are all the former shriner presidents Just a white dude's names like George Seager Oh, so all right, so it's been and as I was taking the scene this woman came up to me Who was hosting the event her name is crystal brown. I do it I try to do something like this once a year from Marlon's anniversary tall black woman long dreads He's very piercing hazel eyes in your relation to Marlon.
It was high school sweetheart since I was 15 And I don't know Marlon's story. I don't Marlon's um three years may 8th. Um, he was still 30 in the morning and he was um allegedly being stopped for not when you see go And so he didn't stop that I was already ran. Um, he was on get some kind of community control where he was supposed to be home back He was on probation for a drug charge had been caught with some painkillers So he ran and immediately the cop car followed him and eventually Marlon's slip fell the cop car hit him I ran into him.
He was pinned on the car for about four or five hours four or five hours. Yeah, yep And Crystal and some neighbors got out to the scene. We sat out there and laid it for five hours until they were able to get the car off them Marlon's pronounced dead And so Crystal and I talked for a little bit and So I just walked around and started introducing myself to people where you guys from in Florida Tampa, Florida Oh, you're from Tampa. Okay, so we just made the driver.
I don't quite know what I was expecting I guess I just thought it was, you know, gonna be a local event for this one person But as I started to meet people I started meeting people from all over from Tampa from Palm Beach Where abouts in America? Yeah, I mean there were people from all over the country Brooklyn, Chicago, Georgia and yes, this is with my son Tana Harris I started seeing these people who were in these t-shirts a pink shirt and then you have two doves with a big picture of a young black man's face or a name That's uh, they represent angels watching over there was one woman with a picture of her son's eighth grade graduation photo on her shirt It's his cap and gown and red. He was 14 years old when he was killed. He was also buried in the same cap in his gown I met another mother this one on the fourth year So I have maybe about six or seven whether the name of her 23-year-old son Rodney Mitchell on her shirt I have one with his graduation picture and I have like a fluorescent black and yellow one I have this Jamaican color one.
I have a black and white. I have different shirts. Oh, yeah I started seeing shirt after shirt after shirt and I take out a ton like 40 people had showed up in all these different shirts I just realized like oh, this is not just a thing for one person. This is a network Like almost everyone there had lost either a cousin or a brother or a husband Even even a daughter to police violence In fact, when I later spoke to one of those women you just heard Cleans her 23-year-old son Rodney Mitchell.
He was shot and killed by police during traffic stop We're actually gonna get in that story later, but she told me that I've met about 400 other mothers They've reached out to me and I 400. Oh, yes. Really? Yeah through like traveling around through Facebook I've met 400 other mothers who's lost their children.
Wow So I was just seeing like a fraction of that at this community center got the scales surprising Right, the other thing for me was how you see these stories pop up 37-year-old Alton Sterling 40-year-old Terrence Fletcher at least the ones that get pulled up to like a national level and you see the family members come out And man with children who depended upon their daddy on a daily basis And for like two days you see them on television that big bad dude was my twin brother that big bad dude Was a father and then they kind of recede and they're gone I guess what I thought is, you know, probably they have these long drawn out legal battles and then You know they go back to their lives, whatever like whatever that means But instead it's like, oh no What happens is they get like folded up into this network We pray for those mostly that will you turn into this family And so at the community center, there was a moment of prayer where the 40 to 50 people sat down at these big round dining tables Because once upon a time ago, there was no coalition like that we got today There was no way to know what to do There was no room praying on how to get justice or how to make changes and how to take our kids and our loved ones And we asked these prayers and our prayers and God's name And so after the prayer Crystal holleth in the back of the room for everybody to eat so everyone stood up And then the vibe just totally changed and some people on some MJ and a lot of people started to crowd around these two big picnic tables Your ladies mind just uh, I am not gonna make one comment. Oh, no, no, no comment We're just wearing it this woman. I mean the only comment I was looking for was if you could just describe for me What we got on the table because I'm just uh what's on the table? Yeah, just what's on the table.
I mean this table right here So I think you have cheese you have sweet tea you have orange juice and then you have your condiments for that, but on the breakfast table You've got your eggs, you've got your grips, you've got your bacon, you've got your sausage You got everything you want to have to get nice good and full on today I gotta get your name, George and even reveal I'm the mother of Santa Blair in case you don't remember July 10th 2015 Hello, man. We'll take time to tell the reason for stopping shouldn't fail if you fail the single link You can subscribe, buy some turns with you. Give me a few minutes, all right Santa Blair is pulled over in a small town in Texas. The cop runs her information comes back to the car You might put out your cigarette, please.
Come on. I'm in my car, but I feel my secret Well, you can step on out now. I don't have to step out of the car Step out of the car. No, you don't have to write.
Step out of the car. Do not have the right to do that. Do not have the right to step out Or I will remove it. I'm getting her move for it.
Step out or I will remove you. I'm giving you a lawful order Don't touch me get out of the car. Don't touch me. I'm not under-westering.
I'm under-westering. You are under-westering. You are under-westering. Get out of the car.
I will let you up. Get out now. Eventually, Santa gets out of the car. I fail you to say no you don't all the next one.
Get over there Sandra was eventually taken in jail four days later in that jail cell She was found dead, hanged with a plastic garbage bag. The death was ruled the suicide and Santa's family disputed that ruling You got everything you want to have to get nice good and full on a date. Can I get your name? Sure, Geneva Reveal.
I'm the mother of Sandra Bland. Sandra Bland. Where are you coming from? Chicago.
I want to let you eat your food. One thing I wanted to ask is have you come to events like this before? Oh, yes, sir. Go ahead a few.
It's in Missouri last week. We go all around. We try to support as many mothers as we can because it's important. Is that exactly?
Is that what it is? Is it really just like a supporter? Yes, sir. It's important because that mother who has lost their baby needs to be able to see somebody else who looks like them Who's in the same situation that they are as opposed to someone walking up to them and saying I know how you feel but you really don't.
Which made me think about something Ben and I had talked about a lot which is in getting to meet these women and talk to these women. You get the sense that their experience is this really unique sort of loss. It sucks to lose somebody with cancer. I've lost a friend of cancer recently in fact.
It's a horrible thing and a very, you know, ten times a hundred times worse for his wife, children than it is for me. I think it's a different thing when your person is killed by another human being and that human being is returned to the streets with a gun and a badge in a position of authority. And this is something you do see in Ben's numbers. Even though the numbers themselves, they can't really tell you whether or not a shooting was legally justified.
What is clear is that over 800 plus shootings, even the shootings where the person was unarmed, only one police officer has ever been charged. So it's this weird sort of like double grief. You know, it's like past and present at the same time. Like you can't put it away because it's every day is another insult kind of.
Right. As soon as something happens. Again, this is around. Somebody, one of us is reaching out whoever is like closest.
Like they have something happened in, you know, here for it. We're going to reach out to each other and then we're going to invite him in. We say this is like the club that nobody really wants to be a part of. It's crazy because it's his family.
I say family is more than just loving. This is my family and I could not have made it this while. I couldn't still be fighting. I wouldn't be doing anything.
So after the event ended at the community center, Crystal took a bunch of the moms, they all got their cars and drove over to this like little gem shop. It's just like do you guys do this after every event or it's just like Crystal knows this one. It's just Crystal knows this one's around here and has been telling everyone about this. This is the ender Joseph, her son, Andrew died in 2014.
So no, we didn't know anything about this but I figured this must be part of the different type of learning. This is part of just coping and dreaming. Right, right. We're all just simply trying to find our way.
It's like Crystal gathered like probably 15 of us into this tiny little store because she wanted to show these women like here's how I cope or here's how I deal with my grief. You can either get the large age at a certain point because I was talking to these two women and she just had this big bundle of sage in her hand. Yeah, because if you want to do like your house, I could like some deep shit like then I open my windows and I just, you really, I go through my house. She says the sage calms her down.
And then they went from the gem shop over to Crystal's house. Mid-sized one-story house in the land and a lot of the women hung out in the living room were drinking juice talking to Ben about his story. Crystal and her cousin were in the kitchen. Cooked him chicken.
And one thing that caught me by surprise is how these women when they come together, they like, they bring with them their own stories, these stories of grief, of suffering. And yet when they're in the same room together, it's like they just, they just have fun. Pay me the night before they all gone out dancing together. There was summer when fire.
And now what we're doing instead of getting motel rooms. Again, this is Natasha Clemens. We're starting to stay over each of his houses. We're leaving each other's bed and each other's couch, you know.
Our mattress is, it becomes like a huge sleepover. And versus us, we want to sleep, we're up talking, you know, getting to know each other, you know, telling stories of his children. So it's like therapy for us. Fickies let me pass.
But there was this moment when I spent the day with these women that really stuck with me. I believe we're at the site of Marlon Brown's death. And it was when Crystal led some of us over to the site where her ex-husband, Marlon, was hit by that squad car. It's like about 12 people here.
And about eight of them were women who had lost either a husband or a brother or a child. And we were basically just in someone's backyard, just walking through this patchy grass. So when you see the video, that's where we just came down. That's the video.
That's the street. And then he turns Marlon's here. And when he comes here, Marlon's probably over like right there. And then the police car that came behind him was probably right here.
And then the officer that hit them came in. And then we come on. We came in, he came right here. And that's why we call the execution in the vegetable garden, because their garden was here.
And the vegetables were growing and all that. They're onions there. Because when they took him away and released and took down the tape and stuff, we came back here. That's all you could smell was onions.
And so now it's not as bad now, but just the association. Like when I'm cutting onions, you get that smell. Like it just, you get those flat. It just brings you right back here.
And the 12 of us just kind of stood there for a minute. Crystal size was starting to get teary. Some of the other ones started to cry. And then y'all want me to take some.
Yeah, my phone ain't the best. A couple of women handed me their phones. And it's probably about these eight women who huddled together and they just stared at the camera. With this sort of straight face.
All right, three, two, one. And then let me, three, two, one. All right. I think we got them.
Then we all started walking back up to the cars. Crystal, I just want to thank you for just sharing that with us, because I know it has to be pretty hard to even come back to the site. Yeah, I can say, we haven't been out here in a long, it's been a while. But we'll go to the great site.
We'll go there. One week. At night, three o'clock in the morning. That's why I remember the end I used to tell you all the time.
How do you live so far away from him? Oh my gosh, that was, that was. Yeah, my son's great. It's about 15 minutes tops from where I live.
Oh, every time I visit home, I have to go there and spend some time. Of course. Yeah, of course. How could you not?
Right? And it ain't no quick. Like, you want to go and take a chair. Uh-huh.
Just sit there. Yeah. And it's crazy because it's like, it's a, it's a cemetery like a little bit further out. And it's crazy.
You can go by there like a certain time every day. And it's this little old white man. He's chair, everything like set up. Like he literally, I think he does he like go and have lunch with her every day?
My dad needs to be, I don't know if it's, it's the cemetery that's way out. Like going towards papa and all of that. It's a little white guy that's always sitting out there. He take his chair.
I can't have a whole lot of those. All right, thanks. How would they? I never stopped the half stop without my hand.
So that trip to Florida was almost about a year ago. And I feel like I happen to be there at this really interesting moment because just a few months after that trip. Geneva Reed Field, who was the mother of Santa Blan, who I met, she spoke at the Democratic National Convention. One year ago, yesterday, I lived the worst nightmare anyone could imagine.
She was on stage with Michael Brown's mother, Eric Garner's mother. I watched as my daughter was lowered into the ground. And it was around this time that a few of these women started to call themselves the mothers of the movement. When I say Mars, you say about the movement.
Some of them showed up at the Women's March in DC. Mars, the movement. And it was weird because in this short amount of time, this thing that we had stumbled into, this thing that really kind of felt like at the time of support group had suddenly become a force coming up. Hey, put it down.
A cop with a gun, a man with a knife. Put the knife down. Put it down. And a look at the razor thin life or death moment between them.
Put it down or you're going to get it again. So stay with us. This is Christopher calling from South Florida. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P.
Sloane Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloane at www.sloane.org. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Guys, it's tax season.
Are you as stoked as I am? No. No, of course you aren't. Because taxes can be super stressful.
I know that I'm going to owe money and so I'm avoiding all the emails from my accountant. I'm not alone. 88% of Americans reported financial stress at the start of 2026. So it's normal, but it doesn't mean you have to white knuckle your way through when life feels overwhelming.
Therapy can help. BetterHelp makes it easy. It says by matching you with one of their over 30,000 licensed professionals tailored to your needs. And if it's not a perfect fit, you can switch at any time.
And look, a therapist can't fix your money problems, but they can't help you address shame, guilt, avoidance. Get matched with a qualified professional on BetterHelp. You can sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash radio lab. That's better h-e-l-p dot com slash radio lab.
Hello you beautiful radio lab listener you. I'm here to say we want your help. We want to make the show better for you. And to do that, we had this a wild thought.
What if we asked you how? So we came up with a survey. And if you're up for taking, I don't know, 15 minutes out of your day, your feedback can help us make the show better. What do you love?
What do you want less of? What do you want more of? We are ready. Our skin is thick.
We want your honest take to help out. Go to radiolab.org slash survey. Again, that's radiolab.org slash survey. Thank you and advanced to those of you who go click the click and write the things.
Bye. Hey, I'm Jadim and Ron. I'm Robert Krillwich. And just let's just pick right back up with our story from Florida.
This Tampa Bay Times would have been Montgomery and our own Matt Kilby. All right, so day two, day two was Daytona. 11th, three, May 3rd, Daytona Beach. Daytona Beach is about everything.
And what happened was went to this thing was these women, mostly black, who have lost people to police violence. And I'm sitting across the table from the African American City Councilman, Daytona Beach. And I told him what I've been working on. I told him something numbers we've learned.
And he said, you really need to meet our police chief. You guys have been running a shower since you got your... His name is Mike Chitwood. Your phone is here.
No, just a microphone. Okay. He's the police chief of Daytona Beach. Known for its wild and rocket spring break scenes, they have Bike Week that draws 500,000 bikers from all over the country.
And Daytona International Speedway. And on top of that, the permanent population, there's like 62,000 people. And over that six-year period, they've only had four police shootings. And that's low?
Yeah, for a city like that, that's really low. Jesse, I need to break down for 2015. And in fact, while we were there, by race, I'll take it and arrest. Chitwood had his assistant print out these spreadsheets.
Here we go. Those are the stats. Thank you. We don't have to do the math.
And these spreadsheets are actually kind of fascinating. Because if you look at them... You know, we can just go right down here and you can add them up. For things like aggravated assault, theft, shoplifting, speeding.
Our arrest ratio and our ticket ratio, basically mirrors our city. In terms of racial- Yeah, we're roughly a 60-40 city. 60% white, 40% African-American. And so when you look at these numbers, it's pretty much what you see.
Tickets for speeding, about 60-40, arrest for theft, about 60-40. That's the way we're supposed to, in theory, approach to law. And so what are they doing differently? Well, a whole bunch of things.
First of all, when all these incidents were occurring in around the country with Ferguson, everything else we did in race and policing, mandatory training for the entire PD. And basically what we wanted our officers to do was, number one, learn the history of the country. What's the history of the country is that we are a racist nation. No matter how you want to look at it, started with moving the Indians off of their land for manifest destiny.
When you look at Jim Crow laws, when you look at the Civil War, you look at slavery, when you look at Bull Connor, for example, of turning the dogs and fire hoses loose on civil rights marches. So it's important for officers to understand that, that you may go into an African-American community and you may think and act and talk away where you think you're being respectful and understanding, but in reality, you're not. But let's not for a moment think that there isn't bias in policing, because there's bias. We all have bias in us.
And the trick is, and I don't know what to trick. I don't know if any of us know how to contain that. How do we stop that bias from coming from when you make a decision? Right.
And I think I've read a lot about implicit bias. It always feels like it feels like a kinder way to say fear, like a fear of a black person, and that fear is greater than what you would feel when you're encountering a white person when you're out on the job as a cop. When you look at some of the shootings that were called on video, and I think of the poor school janitor who lost his life in Minnesota. Oh, yeah.
The Atlantic Steel shooting, yeah. There's a guy who told the officer in no uncertain terms, I'm a good guy. I have a gun permit. You can't get a gun permit if you're a convicted felon.
You can't get a gun permit if you're a drug dealer. I have a gun permit for some unknown reason. That officer's threat level with a baby in the car. And I got a guy and his girlfriend in the car, he's a gun permit holder.
This isn't easy car stop. For some reason, and the reason is because of the color of the man's skin, all of those things never registered, black eye receivers, black eyes pocket, and I shoot. And I would like to tell you, in all my years in policing, I would like to sit here and be not even tell you that we don't shoot unarmed people. As a 28 year practitioner of law enforcement, that second generation cop, I'm appalled at what I see on those videos.
I cannot believe that my profession, in some cases, is that out of control. Some of them I understand what's going on. I mean, you're wrestling in the ground for your life, and there are times that we have to use deadly force. But the incident in South Carolina, the incident in Minnesota, I mean, are you kidding me?
What are we doing? I mean, how do you train that out of an officer so that when they make a traffic stop, they're not already operating with this level of height and fear or this perceived threat? In my opinion, number one, you have to train tactically sound. You have to train using real life scenarios that take that extra split second before you fire your weapon.
And I'll give you an anecdote very quickly. When I first went to Philadelphia Police Department, we were shooting people at a crazy rate on an accidental discharge. The officer had their finger on the trigger. When they would go to grab that person, if that person pulled or moved you would jerk back, and it was a natural reaction to squeeze the trigger.
So they sent us all back up to the police academy, and we all had to retrain it on how to keep your finger on the side plate of the weapon, not on the trigger. So if that happened, you wouldn't accidentally trip and fire and shoot somebody, and you might have thought it was Armageddon. Oh, my God, they're going to get us killed. One reality, what it did was it slowed down your field of vision.
It slowed everything down. That split second didn't make a difference. That blink of an eye didn't make a difference. It made a difference in you're not shooting, because that split second let you see what you thought may have been the color of my glass coming out.
My cell phone was a cell phone. So you buy yourself a little bit of time. And this is the thing that shit comes back to again and again, is this idea of time. In certain situations, slow down.
When you're dealing with a mentally ill person, slow down. Like whatever you can do, you use coverage, just create some space to buy yourself another 30 seconds. That extra 30 seconds may be the difference between saving your life and somebody else's life. Another interesting thing was, and Ben found this out also through some of his reporting with other police chiefs, is the idea that some police chiefs don't like to hire kids at a high school, like 19, 20 year olds, in part because- Everything you do is this.
It's only not a commute case like this, and when they look up and talk to somebody, and I'm serious about going through the drive through McDonald's, and they get pissed off the person ordering cheaper. How did you do it? It's just their demeanor, it's just the way they act. In fact, Ben told me that he'd talk to a different police chief, who told him the young people who were coming into the academy past few years, have never been in a physical fight, which is a problem because when they get into a fight, their heart starts to race and the muscles tense up, and they don't really know what to do, so they freak out.
And they're way more likely to draw a weapon and use the weapon to, you know, to- in the confrontation. So how do you- you can't ask her, how many times have you beat somebody up or been beaten up on your- No, no, so that- Ben says that that's why the police chief told him he looks to hire bouncers? I see, bouncers. Or for Chip what he said- From just my little myopic world that I live in, we have an awful high number of many women who serve in the military.
They are my best officers. They are level-headed. They are well-trained. They know how to follow the policy.
Basically, they know how to not freak out during a confrontation. And last thing, promise is the last thing. One of the most important things, Chip, it says- Yeah, you have to get into the community. And I'm not talking about the good stuff.
Oh, they bought Christmas gifts or they cooked Thanksgiving dinner. I'm talking day to day. You have to get to know people. Yeah, let me get on the phone.
All right, sure. And so to make this point, Chip, we've got to walk me down the hall to another office. There you go. All right, send me down to the computer.
The channel comes in about 20 seconds. OK. Show me this video. There you go.
So video starts in silence and it's a body cam video. It's a body cam on the cop who is driving in a squat car. He's got his body cameras mounted to his eye. On his glasses.
So the cameras going where his eyes go. Next to him, as your side is his partner. Both cops are white. Also, it's night.
So the call is for a guy who's running around with a knife trying to stab people. His office meds. I think he was on a crack cocaine binge if I remember correctly. They parked.
It's a little neighborhood street. And you can see down the street. They have to walk away. No, man.
This shirtless black guy. That's the cop talking to him the cop wearing the body cam. And this black man. He's got his arm raised.
Pretty big knife in his hand. And he's walking towards the cops. Why don't you stop acting so crazy? Like I get closer and closer and closer.
And finally the cop wearing the body cam pulls out. The other officer is behind him with his firearm out. And the guy is approaching approaching approaching approaching. Put your knife on the knife now.
Put it down. And he gets within like 10 feet of the cops. And then the guy with the body cam fires the taser. The guy holding the knife.
He falls onto his back onto his cement driveway. He still got the knife in his hand. Put it down. And the cop who's got his gun out.
He hustles over, kicks the knife out of the guy's hand, grabs him by the hand, turns him over, and then he's the trained central cop for. Cups him. And then. Hey, Derek, man, it's not a smart idea to have a knife coming out of police.
The officer will say, why didn't you listen to me and just drop the knife and walk to me? Why did you keep coming at me? You're real lucky you didn't get shot. I want it.
I was trying. I was trying. You're trying your best to get shot. Want to see that?
You want to die? I want to see that. You want to die? I can't.
I can't. You can't die. He tells the officer goes, I'm Jesus Christ. And I want everybody to know that police bullets can't kill me.
All right, Derek, we're going to stand up. All right, count 3, 1, 2, 3. So the two cops pick him up. Walk him over to the squad car.
Put him in. And the view ends. Huh. So this is the thing that you guys, you use this video for what exactly?
It's just one of multitude of videos that we show officers on the correct way to do things. You know, and that's the points we hit home are the officers use time and distance to their advantage. They didn't pull right up. And the guy leans in the car and starts to stab one of me.
And now you have to resort to deadly force right away. They use verbal commands first. Warn them. Let them know what's going on.
Trigger control was another thing. You know, with that taser taser taser taser. Taser taser taser. And this is important because their guy's partner was holding a gun.
Have you heard this pop? He might have just instinctively reacted, thinking I was a gunshot and fired his gun. So you know he's deploying the taser. And communication is communication with the person you're trying to arrest and communication with your fellow officers.
Those are the things that we drive home. And again, there was no doubt in my mind that they, one officer in particular, knew that individual from prior contact. Right. I mean, it's interesting to hear him say the name Derek.
Right. It's like Derek is Derek and Derek isn't just a black man shirtless with a knife in his hand. When there's no connection there, it's a lot easier to see somebody who's nameless and faceless. And I got scared and I shot him.
But because of that, knowing that officer, because of that, and established some kind of a rapport that made the officer think of how he's going to deal with this thing. And actually, after we finished watching that video and I was packing up, Chip went and told me that just a couple months after that incident. I'm biking through the neighborhood. And my man said on the front step waves, I mean, hey, Chip, what are you doing, man?
Did Derek does? You're stupid son of a bitch. You don't have close skin to being dead. But he's back when his medication wasn't doing drugs.
And he was completely as normal as me and you are right now. Now, again, almost kind of like when I was with these women, it felt like I was just in Daytona at this specific moment because it was just a few months after I left. Last night's primary election among the big winners, Daytona Beach's police chief. He is now Volusia County's new sheriff.
Mike Chip would, was he elected the sheriff of Volusia County? I am extremely humbled. I am extremely honored. Which is the county that Daytona Beach belongs to.
And the other thing to mention is that Chippet belongs to this organization called Perf, which is the Police Executive Research Forum. It's this big coalition of police chiefs. And in 2016, Perf put out what they call their 30 guiding principles for the use of force. And the number one principle, rather than being something law and order, law and order, is the sanctity of human life.
Now, just a month after Perf put out those principles, two of the biggest policing organizations in the world, the ICP, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and the Fraternal Order of Police, the big policing union, both came out against these guiding principles. Basically saying that being a cop is a dangerous job and some of these principles make it more dangerous. And then just like eight months later so, the ICP and the Fraternal Order of Police started to adopt some of these principles publicly. Despite that, there still is a bit of a divide between the organizations.
But according to Ben, for the very first time, I think you're seeing these massive conversations. Now, police weren't talking about this two or three years ago. Huh, I don't know, man. Just thinking about this, you've got these women who have become kind of a political force.
You have also this growing movement of cops who are possibly changing away policing is done in America, at least maybe slowly. But cumulatively, it does, I hesitate to use this word, but it does make, it does feel like reason for hope. Right, and I sort of felt the same way too, but there was this experience that I had just realized how far hope has to go. We are here to see Natasha Clemens.
Natasha Clemens, the mother of Rodney Mitchell. So Natasha's woman who you heard earlier, back at the community center. I've met 400 other mothers, who's lost their children. That's actually when I first met her.
Ben had been reporting on Natasha for like a couple years by this point. And we were there because Ben was going to hand a ton of documents over to Natasha on her son, Rodney's case, because she didn't have any. And I was there because we'd set up a short interview with Natasha, but when we got to her door, she just started sobbing. And Ben and I just had no idea what had happened.
But eventually I just turned the tape recorder off. Huh, so what was happening in that moment? Well, okay, so to back up, I'm so meeting somebody like a chip would, you know, like there is a sort of hope in that, I believe. But the thing about a chip would, a share of a police chief is that they only have the power to fire a police officer.
And that's really about it. After that, it goes into the court system. And so for Natasha, her son, Rodney, 23 years old, unarmed was shot and killed by two police officers turning traffic stop. After the shooting, a judge ruled that the two officers had done nothing wrong.
They'd acted in accordance with the law. And it just so happened that 45 minutes before Ben and I showed up at her door, she just got an email from her lawyer saying that the appeal that she had filed against that decision had just been rejected. And so we sat there in Natasha's apartment for a while. We actually even left for like an hour, eventually came back, kind of just hit reset on the whole thing.
Eventually Natasha showed me some pictures of Rodney. Long dreads, he's got a big smile. Big smile, bright white smile. Then we sat down at our kitchen table.
Okay, so if you can walk me back to the night that kind of everything happened. June 11th, 2012. Natasha was at home. 930 at night.
Rodney, who was 23 years old, was back from college and out driving Natasha's car. That's when all the phone calls started happening. People calling and saying something's going on with your car. I knew something was wrong.
So I immediately started screaming outside to see if I can get somebody to respond to help me so I can get a ride. Nobody came out, so I started running down the interstate. Barefoot. I just left.
I don't even recall locking the door or anything like that. Eventually a family member actually picks her up. They drive to the scene, she gets there. It looks like just people everywhere, police cars.
And I was like, where's Rodney? I was looking for my vehicle. And my one cousin says, he's over there. She went about 20 feet over to where the car had come to a stop.
It had collided with gas station. But then she had the back of my pants so that I couldn't run over there. The whole place was surrounded by a police tape. And eventually Natasha says it took a couple hours about a cop, pulled her off to the side, and told her that her son had been shot and killed at police.
I just got on my knees and started praying. Don't let this be true of the police, Laura. I was basically begging and pleading. That's the only thing I could do.
What else do you do? It's cry, scream, pray, cry, scream, pray, cry, scream, pray. Next thing you know, I woke up, I was at the hospital. Natasha says that she apparently was so frenzied that an EMT on the scene snuck her with something.
To calm me down. So when I woke up, I see my family standing over me in the hospital. Now as to what happened to Rodney that night, Ben has looked at testimony from the cops involved from eyewitnesses, different court records, to piece together the events. Yeah, Rodney and according to all these documents, that night Rodney and his 16-year-old cousin were in a touches car.
They had stopped at a gas station. They had left the gas station, and were driving down this highway wind. He and his little cousin get pulled over by two white officers. The officer said he saw him without a seat belt.
Turns out Rodney was wearing a seat belt. And these two officers approach his vehicle. One is kind of standing in front of the car. About several feet away towards the driver side.
And the officer approaches his window. According to Rodney's cousin. You pull over sooner. And then orders Rodney to put the car in park.
And Rodney's got both hands at this point on the steering wheel. And he reaches down to put the car in park. And this is where things in the story sort of diverge. Because the cops say that Rodney put the car in park, but then quickly put it back in the drive, accelerated at the officer in front of the car.
Rodney's cousin gives two conflicting accounts at what happened. There was apparently an eyewitness across the street who said the car had yet to move. But what is clear is what happened next, which is the deputy in front. Pulls out his gun, fires two shots in the windshield.
The deputy right by the door. Here's the fire. He pulls the gun and fires twice. One bullet went through Rodney's left hand, which he put up in self-defense.
Another bullet entered through his left temple. And the car lurches forward and curings across the street. For about 300 yards until it collides with this gas station. Rodney's cousin, at this point, gets out of the car, flees from the scene, unharmed.
Eventually paramedics arrive and pronounce Rodney out of the scene. My mind is always on Rodney. When Thatcher says when she does think about that, she always comes back to this one question. Why were the guns pulled?
Why? Why was that? What was that all about? What do you think the answer is?
He's black. And that's just it. Is there ever a moment where you try and put yourself in the mind of those two officers? Absolutely not.
Because I would never do somebody's kit like that. That never crossed. No. I would never do that.
Do you feel like it's like, do you feel like the cop in that moment, Rodney's black is what frightens the cop? And that's why he pulls his gun out? No, he's a bully. Hell, if somebody gets hurt, if somebody gets injured or killed, he's going to get off.
He's behind that blue bed. She's a bully. Is that what you think of cops like writ large? That's how it is.
That's exactly how it is. Yeah, it's about it. Because it's hard for me because I think like it's clear that there's discrimination that exists within the police force and the people who they are sworn to protect and serve. But like at the end of the day, there's probably a hand like, I don't know, I couldn't give you a percentage.
But a number of officers in which like, yes, they're probably violent individuals who don't belong in a police force. But I would assume that like a majority of the cops meanwhile have probably probably have some sort of bias where they don't think I see a black person and I'm going to like, I'm going to get that boy. But there's like some sort of triggered response. And that the police are constantly being put into different situations where they feel under threat and concerned.
And that like, it was like a whole host of factors leading these moments where somebody is shot and killed. It's not just that they're out here bullying people. You say that because you're white. That's why you say that.
I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what, we can try this. Go to my sister, we'll make sure you get your week. Go to a tennis club, get yourself spray black. And I guarantee you, you'll get a different response.
I'll tell you why. I bet you we can make you look like a black boy. I'm telling you, you'll see a huge difference. And that's just it.
Like sitting there in that moment, I felt the golf. And I just kept wondering like, how long does it take to fill that golf? Like how many chibwoods does it take? How many conversations need to happen?
And then in case. Do you want us to then still have to give Natasha those files on Rodney? To get those documents for you? I appreciate it.
Sure. Okay. So Ben grabbed this huge folder of paper out of the trunk of our car. Walk back inside.
Then put the stack of Rodney's files on this glass kitchen table. So get out of the stack. Like 10 crime scene photos. Because I don't want to be the person to give you those.
Unless you want me to go get them right now. But they're, you know. I don't want to have to. I don't want to be traumatized.
You just find the good graphic. You know, so I'll leave it to you. And you have to tell me right now. Yeah.
When I'm ready, I'll get them to have something. And I'm going to eventually see. Three days later Natasha contacted Ben and said that she was ready to see those photos. Huge thanks to Ben Montgomery at the Tampa Bay times and to the staff of the paper that did all the hard work of gathering statistics and material.
In the near near future, they're going to be putting out Ben's story, a whole series of videos and interactive graphic with all their final numbers. It should be amazing. Definitely check it out. We'll make sure that we link to it when it's live from our website, radiolab.org.
And then of course to our own Matt Kilti, who reported and produced this piece. Next week, we'll bring you part two of Matt Kilti and Ben Montgomery's reporting. It's a very different kind of story. Check in for that.
Okay. I'm Jad Abunran. I'm Robert Krollich. Thanks for listening.
This is George Washington III in Charlotte, North Carolina. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrod. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Soren Wheeler is senior editor.
Jamie York is our senior producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Brenna Ferrell, David Gable, Matt Kilti, Robert Krollich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Melissa O'Donnell, Ariane Wack, and Molly Webster. With help from Tracy Hunt, Valentina Bohenini, Negar Fatali, Phoebe Wang, and Katie Ferguson. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.