Shots Fired: Part 1

Summary

Radiolab: "Shots Fired: Part 1" — Detailed Episode Summary

Podcast: Radiolab
Episode: Shots Fired: Part 1
Date: March 17, 2017
Hosts: Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich
Guests/Contributors: Ben Montgomery (Tampa Bay Times reporter), Matt Kilty (producer), Mike Chitwood (Daytona Beach Police Chief), Crystal Brown, Natasha Clemens, Geneva Reed-Veal, and others

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Overview: Main Theme & Purpose

This episode investigates police shootings in Florida, spurred by the lack of comprehensive national data. Reporter Ben Montgomery builds the most thorough database of police shootings in Florida’s history and the Radiolab team follows both the numbers and the lives behind them. Through interviews, community events, and law enforcement perspectives, the episode explores the personal and systemic impacts of police violence, the mothers and families affected, and the nuances of policing, bias, and hope for change.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Track Police Shootings? The Data Void

• Background: In the wake of high-profile police shootings (e.g., Mike Brown in Ferguson), there was widespread realization that no comprehensive U.S. database exists tracking deadly force by police ([01:01]–[02:22]).
• Ben Montgomery’s Project: Ben decides to focus on Florida, using its strong public records laws to reach out to every police precinct for data ([02:55]–[03:20]).
• Method & Scope: Amassed 5,000+ pages, 388 departments, covering 831 shootings from 2009-2014 ([03:45]–[04:12]).

2. Findings: What the Numbers Reveal

• Steady Numbers: Police shootings in Florida have held steady—about 130 per year—contradicting public perception that the problem is escalating ([05:23]–[05:38]).
  • Ben: "The numbers are flat." ([05:23])
• Mental Illness: About a third of cases involve someone diagnosed as mentally ill, often including “suicide by cop” scenarios ([06:02]–[06:47]).
• Racial Disparities: 40% of those shot are Black, despite African-Americans comprising only about 17% of Florida’s population—making them four times as likely to be shot as whites ([07:12]–[07:37]).
• Demographics of Incidents: 50.9% of those shot were carrying a firearm, 9% a blade; 70% involved resisting arrest ([07:44]–[07:52]).
• Limits of Data: Numbers provide clarity but lack depth—each incident is deeply personal and involves immense individual tragedy ([08:09]–[09:16]).

3. Individual Stories: From Numbers to Faces

• Community Gathering: Matt Kilty visits the “Third Anniversary Celebration” for Marlon Brown, an unarmed Black man killed by police, held at a Shrine Club in DeLand, Florida ([09:45]–[10:53]).
• Grieving Networks: What appeared to be a local memorial was actually a network—a support system for hundreds of mothers who have lost children to police violence ([12:17]–[13:45]).
  • Natasha Clemens: "I've met about 400 other mothers who's lost their children." ([13:37])
• Geneva Reed-Veal: Mother of Sandra Bland, becomes a central presence, highlighting the transformation of these women into national advocates—the “Mothers of the Movement” ([16:02]–[17:56]).

Memorable Scene

• Support & Therapy: The event transitions from solemn support (“there was no blueprint on how to get justice, on how to make change, ... to protect our kids and our loved ones” [14:55]) to communal meal, music, dancing, and even coping mechanisms (visiting a gem shop, using sage for healing rituals) ([15:30]–[21:00]).

4. The Cycle of Grief and Activism

• Double Grief: Beyond death, the mothers deal with a “double grief”—both losing a loved one and witnessing the lack of legal accountability. Of 831 shootings, only one officer charged ([18:54]).
• Ongoing Community: The group gives each other indispensable support—"This is like the club that nobody really wants to be a part of. It's crazy, but it's family." — Crystal Brown ([19:27])
• Transformation: Grieving families are galvanized into a political force ("Mothers of the Movement") ([27:18]).

5. Police Perspective: Daytona Beach Chief Mike Chitwood

• Introduction: Known for progressive policies and unusually low rates of police shootings in Daytona Beach ([29:14]–[30:01]).
• On Bias & Training: Mandated race and policing training—“The history of the country is that we are a racist nation, no matter how you want to look at it.” — Mike Chitwood ([31:05])
  • Admits to systemic bias: “Let's not for a moment think that there isn't bias in policing, because there's bias.” ([31:45])
• Training to “Buy Seconds,” Prevent Tragedy: Emphasizes tactical training to slow down confrontations, keep fingers off triggers, and avoid escalating situations ([33:28]–[34:30]).
• Building Relationships: Advocates actual community engagement, not just showy events ([36:10]–[36:17]).
• Example Video: Chitwood shares a body-cam video where a potentially deadly confrontation is de-escalated with time, patience, and community connection ([36:28]–[39:12]).
  • “There was no doubt in my mind that the one officer in particular knew that individual from prior contact." ([39:38])
• Change in Policing Culture: See officers as people, not statistics or threats—knowing “Derek” by name is what saves lives ([39:42]).

6. Limits of Progress & The Ongoing Systemic Challenge

• From Hope to Reality: Despite progress, real power over justice after a shooting lies with the courts, not police chiefs ([44:07]).
• Rodney Mitchell’s Story: Natasha Clemens’ son, 23, was killed by police at a traffic stop. Officers claimed threat; Natasha and evidence disputed this. No charges were brought ([45:26]–[48:38]).
  • Natasha: “My mind is always on Rodney. ... Why were the guns pulled?” ([48:40]–[48:45])
• Racial Divide & Empathy Gap: Conversations reveal deep divides in trust and experience between Black Americans and many white observers (see rhetorical offer: “get yourself sprayed black, and I guarantee you'll get a different response” [50:39–51:10]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (With Timestamps)

• graphic violence advisory: Jad Abumrad ([00:02])
• “What we react to is all anecdotal ... Is it trending one way or the other? ... We don’t know. Because nobody tracks these.” — Ben Montgomery ([01:19])
• “You can see so A, B, Bay County... all the way through the Alphabet.” — Ben Montgomery, on the scale of collected data ([03:48])
• “The numbers are flat.” — Ben Montgomery ([05:23])
• “If you’re a black person in Florida, you are four times as likely to be shot by police than if you’re white.” — Jad Abumrad ([07:30])
• “It’s a nasty mess ... I'm still just moved by the single cases, the individual cases ... every report is at least one human life.” — Ben Montgomery ([08:18]–[09:16])
• “I've met about 400 other mothers who's lost their children.” — Natasha Clemens ([13:41])
• “Once upon a time ago, there was no coalition like we have today ... There was no blueprint on how to get justice ...” — Crystal Brown ([14:55])
• “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.” — Ben Montgomery ([18:29])
• “This is like the club that nobody really wants to be a part of. ... I couldn't still be fighting. I wouldn't be doing anything if it wasn't for them.” — Crystal Brown ([19:27])
• “The history of the country is that we are a racist nation, no matter how you want to look at it.” — Chief Mike Chitwood ([31:05])
• “Let's not for a moment think that there isn't bias in policing, because there's bias.” — Mike Chitwood ([31:45])
• “‘Slow down when you’re dealing with a mentally ill person.’ That extra 30 seconds may be the difference between saving your life and somebody else’s life.” — Mike Chitwood ([34:37]–[34:50])
• “There was no doubt in my mind that the one officer in particular knew that individual from prior contact." — Mike Chitwood ([39:38])
• "You say that because you're white ... I bet you we can make you look like a Black boy. ... I'm telling you, you'll see a huge difference." — Natasha Clemens ([50:39])
• “How long does it take to fill that gulf? How many Chitwoods does it take? ... How many conversations need to happen?” — Matt Kilty ([51:10])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:43] Introduction of Ben Montgomery and backstory of the data project
• [03:36] Assembling the Florida police shooting database
• [05:23] Key findings: the numbers are flat, not rising
• [07:12] Racial breakdown of those shot by police in Florida
• [09:45] Visiting Marlon Brown’s anniversary event and broader network of mothers
• [13:37] Natasha Clemens shares she's met 400 other grieving mothers
• [16:02]–[17:56] Geneva Reed-Veal and the evolution of “Mothers of the Movement”
• [18:54] Only one officer charged out of over 800 shootings
• [19:27] Crystal Brown on support networks and community
• [29:14]–[36:17] Mike Chitwood, low shooting rates, training, and bias in Daytona Beach Police
• [36:28]–[39:12] Body-cam de-escalation video
• [45:26]–[48:38] Natasha Clemens recounts the loss of her son Rodney Mitchell
• [50:39]–[51:10] Candid exchange about racial experience and police violence
• [51:46]–[52:08] Turning over Rodney's files to Natasha Clemens

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Conclusion: The Scope of the Problem, Signs of Change

The episode acknowledges the progress made both by grieving families organizing for accountability and by reform-minded law enforcement, but closes on the sobering reality that legal systems and societal divisions are formidable obstacles.

As Jad Abumrad summarizes: “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 the way policing is done in America. ... But cumulatively ... it does feel like reason for hope.” ([42:05]–[42:28])

Still, personal grief, systemic bias, and mistrust reveal that meaningful change is slow and incomplete. The gulf between the lived experiences of Black families and police (and observers) remains both wide and painful.

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Next Episode Teaser:
The story continues in Part 2, with more reporting from Ben Montgomery and Matt Kilty, following another Florida police shooting story.

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This summary is intended to capture the rich detail, tone, and narrative flow of the original episode while making the key content accessible for new listeners.

Transcript

[Jad Abumrad]

Before we start, this podcast contains some tape that describes some pretty graphic violence. We want to let you know that before we get going. Wait, you're listening?

[Natasha Clemens]

Okay.

[Crystal Brown]

All right.

[Natasha Clemens]

Okay.

[Matt Kilty]

All right. You're listening to Radiolab Radio Lab from wnyc.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. And today.

[Robert Krulwich]

We'Re gonna start this show with a fellow named Ben Montgomery, a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times.

[Jad Abumrad]

He's a guy we've had on the show before. Ben, say something.

[Ben Montgomery]

Hi, this is Ben.

[Matt Kilty]

Hi, Ben.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, everything is good. Good. All right. We just wanna know from you, like, what are you guys doing? How are you doing it?

[Matt Kilty]

What are you thinking?

[Ben Montgomery]

I'll start at the beginning.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, start at the beginning. Tell us what you're doing.

[Ben Montgomery]

So after the Mike Brown shooting in.

[Mike Chitwood]

Ferguson, there is growing outrage tonight after an unarmed African American teenager was shot and killed.

[Ben Montgomery]

When that became a national story, there was a lot of bellyaching in the press.

[Mike Chitwood]

How many people do we see killed in the United States about by the police each year? How?

[Ben Montgomery]

No one keeps accurate statistics.

[Mike Chitwood]

There's currently no national statistics on police.

[Ben Montgomery]

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.

[Matt Kilty]

Tamir Rice, Jason Harrison, Sam Duboza, and.

[Ben Montgomery]

Will 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. The FBI doesn't. State agencies don't, for the most part, really.

[Jad Abumrad]

So that that data doesn't exist somewhere within the police department itself.

[Ben Montgomery]

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 snatchings 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, there have been a couple of organizations that have tried to keep track.

[Ben Montgomery]

Nationally, but everything that's done so far is incomplete, you know, because most of.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Ben Montgomery]

That's right.

[Jad Abumrad]

So Ben and His editors thought, let's.

[Ben Montgomery]

Do something that's more complete. Let's do something that's unprecedented.

[Jad Abumrad]

So first thought he had Florida. It's the third biggest state. Demographics are pretty similar to the rest of the country.

[Ben Montgomery]

And Florida has wonderful public records laws.

[Jad Abumrad]

Legally, it's easier to get information in Florida than in a lot of other places. So Ben sat down and started emailing every single police precinct in the entire state of Florida.

[Ben Montgomery]

I think I sent 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hounding police departments, getting lawyers involved.

[Ben Montgomery]

This is a massive thing that involved probably no less than a hundred people.

[Jad Abumrad]

But eventually.

[Matt Kilty]

Thank you, sir.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ben put together the most comprehensive police shooting database that we know of.

[Ben Montgomery]

I want to show Matt these documents.

[Robert Krulwich]

A while back, we sent our producer, Matt Kilty down to the Tampa Bay Times.

[Matt Kilty]

Oh, is this them right here to check it out?

[Ben Montgomery]

Yeah.

[Matt Kilty]

How many documents do you think you have sitting on this desk?

[Ben Montgomery]

There's probably 5,000 pages. I have a stack of paper that's about as tall as me, six feet tall. We got them broken down by county, but you can see so A, B, Bay County, Boca Raton, Boynton beach, all the way through the Alphabet.

[Matt Kilty]

You basically just have all these manila folders with tons of papers in them spread across an entire desk.

[Ben Montgomery]

There'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 what we did was go through all of this material, scrape each of those reports for every bit of information that we could get that we thought was useful. Circumstantial stuff. Did it involve a SWAT team? Did it involve an armed suspect? Was there a chase? All the demographic information for the firing officer or officers and the people were hit by those bullets. Then we thought, let's learn from these. Let's see how we can compile the data and build a database and hopefully draw some conclusions, some lessons, some solutions.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is all going to go into a giant online database at the Tampa Bay Times website. Hopefully other organizations in 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. And initially, some of it, you know, kind of surprised us.

[Ben Montgomery]

Well, the biggest sort of counterintuitive line in this. The numbers are flat.

[Jad Abumrad]

He says if you look at the numbers, what you see year after year.

[Ben Montgomery]

After year, the numbers have stayed steady.

[Jad Abumrad]

About 130 people shot by police every year.

[Ben Montgomery]

Which seems odd because, you know, the past couple of years, these videos that go vi and 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Ben Montgomery]

And 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Their meds at the time of the shoot.

[Robert Krulwich]

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 is apparently trying to get themselves shot intentionally.

[Ben Montgomery]

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 what they want the police to think is a weapon.

[Robert Krulwich]

So it's called I'm gonna kill myself, but I'm gonna make you do it to me.

[Ben Montgomery]

Right.

[Robert Krulwich]

And that's considered a suicide attempt because they know they're gonna get shot. It's an.

[Ben Montgomery]

That's right.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is something that people who cover police apparently know quite well.

[Ben Montgomery]

You know, they're the news briefs that you see once or twice a week.

[Jad Abumrad]

But it was news to us. I mean, clearly, police are now like, the de facto front line in dealing with mental illness in this country. But when it got to Ben's central question, what do the numbers say about race?

[Ben Montgomery]

I think I would start with the fact that there.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm not sure it was so surprising.

[Ben Montgomery]

That 40% of people shot by police are black. And that is out of whack with the Florida demographics.

[Robert Krulwich]

What is the percentage of African Americans in Florida?

[Ben Montgomery]

It's not 40%.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's more like 17.

[Ben Montgomery]

That's right.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Ben Montgomery]

This doesn't tell us much right now, but the breakdown between fatalities for those same demographics, and as we sat there.

[Jad Abumrad]

Going through this particular set of numbers.

[Ben Montgomery]

50.9% were carrying a firearm, 9% had a blade 70% involved some form of resisting arrest.

[Jad Abumrad]

You know, and we talked with them numerous times over two years, you know, drilling down on those numbers.

[Ben Montgomery]

And as we were doing that 50.9%.

[Jad Abumrad]

You know, it was weird. I started to feel like, you know, I'm really glad that we have these numbers finally. That in itself is a good thing.

[Ben Montgomery]

But to move further down, 91 of the 570 or 16, the numbers themselves.

[Jad Abumrad]

Don'T really get you very far.

[Ben Montgomery]

16%. Aces 1%.

[Jad Abumrad]

The more you hear, it's just like, yeah, this is only one ultimately limited way of knowing the problem.

[Ben Montgomery]

Yeah, I mean, I mean, what's. What gets me is like the. I don't know, it's back to where we were and why we wanted to start this. It's a nasty mess. I'm still just moved by the single cases, the individual cases, and it's hard to remember that each of these is, you know, I mean, they're all written in this. Preliminary investigations revealed that ASPD Officer Matthew Fowler received a call. In this staccato, sterile police speak, Fowler approached Department 255 and was confronted by a white male, later identified as Anthony Skiles, armed with a knife, at apartment 255. But 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Matt Kielty 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, Matt. I guess we'll just turn it over to you. Yep.

[Matt Kilty]

Okay. So day one.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. Where was this place again?

[Matt Kilty]

DeLand. DeLand, Florida. Windows are down, it's hot. It's probably low 80s. Little town on the east coast of Florida. And we were there because Ben had found out about this event. Do you even know what the thing is called?

[Ben Montgomery]

It's the third. They call it celebration. The third anniversary celebration of the police killing of Marlon Brown.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay.

[Matt Kilty]

And this event was being held at the West Volusia Shrine Club.

[Jad Abumrad]

Shrine Club.

[Matt Kilty]

Shrine Club.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like Shriners.

[Matt Kilty]

Like the Shriners. I'm just going to walk in and introduce myself. So I walk in and, you know, it's just Like a small community center, Linoleum floor, fluorescent lights. And the first thing I noticed, to be honest, is there's about 20 people in here, mostly black, who are just milling 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. They're just old white dudes. Names like George Seeger, Gunter Lundwig. Oh, so, alright, so then. And as I was taking in the scene, this woman came up to me who was hosting the event. Her name is Crystal Brown.

[Crystal Brown]

I try to do something like this once a year for Marlon's anniversary.

[Matt Kilty]

Tall black woman, long dreads, and these very piercing hazel eyes. And your relation to Marlon?

[Crystal Brown]

Ex wife. It was high school sweetheart, since I was 15.

[Matt Kilty]

And I don't know Marlon's story.

[Crystal Brown]

I don't Marlon. It was three years, May 8th. It was 12:30 in the morning. And he was allegedly being stopped for not wearing a seatbelt. And so he didn't stop. He got out of his car and he ran. He was on, I guess, some kind of community control where he was supposed to be home by 12.

[Matt Kilty]

He was on probation for a drug charge. He'd been caught with some painkillers. So he ran and immediately the cop car followed him. And eventually Marlon slipped, fell. The cop car hit him going 24 miles per hour.

[Crystal Brown]

Ran into him. He was pinned under the car for about four or five hours.

[Matt Kilty]

Four or five hours? Usually.

[Crystal Brown]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yep.

[Matt Kilty]

When Crystal and some neighbors got out to the scene, we sat out there.

[Crystal Brown]

And waited for or five hours until they were able to get the car off of him.

[Matt Kilty]

Marlon was pronounced dead. And so Crystal and I talked for a little bit. And you don't mind if I sit and join you for a minute, Is that okay? I sort of just walked around, started introducing myself to people. Where are you guys from in Florida?

[Crystal Brown]

Tampa, Florida.

[Matt Kilty]

Oh, you're from Tampa. Okay. So we just made the drive. 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 to meet people from all over from Tampa, from Palm Beach. Whereabouts in New York are you? I mean, there were people from all over the country. East Flatbush, Brooklyn, Chicago, Georgia.

[Crystal Brown]

And yes, this is my son, Tanares.

[Matt Kilty]

I started seeing these people who were wearing 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.

[Crystal Brown]

They represent angels watching over.

[Matt Kilty]

There was one woman with a picture of her son's 8th grade graduation photo on her shirt.

[Crystal Brown]

It's his cap and gown in red.

[Matt Kilty]

He was 14 years old when he was killed.

[Crystal Brown]

He was also buried in this same cap in his gown.

[Matt Kilty]

I met another mother.

[Natasha Clemens]

This is going on the fourth year, so I have maybe about six or.

[Matt Kilty]

Seven who had the name of her 23 year old son, Rodney Mitchell on her shirt.

[Natasha Clemens]

I have one with his graduation picture on it. 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.

[Matt Kilty]

And I started seeing shirt after shirt after shirt. And I'd say by the time like 40 people had showed up and there were 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 a daughter to police violence. In fact, when I later spoke to one of those women, you just heard.

[Natasha Clemens]

I have one with his graduation picture.

[Matt Kilty]

Her name is Natasha Clemens. Her 23 year old son, Rodney Mitchell, he was shot and killed by police during a traffic stop. We're actually going to get into that story later. But she told me that I've met.

[Natasha Clemens]

About 400 other mothers. They've reached out to me and I.

[Matt Kilty]

400?

[Natasha Clemens]

Oh, yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

Really?

[Matt Kilty]

Yeah. Through like traveling around through Facebook, I've.

[Natasha Clemens]

Met 400 other mothers who's lost their children.

[Mike Chitwood]

Wow.

[Matt Kilty]

And so I was just seeing like a fraction of that at this community center.

[Jad Abumrad]

God, the scale is surprising.

[Matt Kilty]

Right. And the other thing for me was how you see these stories pop up.

[Mike Chitwood]

37 year old Alton Sterling, 40 year.

[Matt Kilty]

Old Terrence Crutcher, at least the ones that get pulled up to like a national level. And you see the family members come.

[Crystal Brown]

Out, a man with children who depended upon their daddy on a daily basis.

[Matt Kilty]

And for like two days you see them on television.

[Crystal Brown]

That big bad dude was my twin brother. That big bad dude was a father.

[Matt Kilty]

And then they kind of recede and they're gone. And 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 and we pray.

[Crystal Brown]

For those mostly that will be coming to this family.

[Matt Kilty]

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 rooms tables.

[Crystal Brown]

Because once upon a time ago, there was no coalition like we have today. There was no way to know what to do. There was no blueprint on how to get justice, on how to make change, and how to protect our kids and our loved ones. And we ask these prayers and all prayers in God's name. Amen.

[Matt Kilty]

And so after the prayer, Crystal hollered from the back of the room for everybody to eat. So everyone stood up. And then the vibe just totally changed, and somebody put on some mj and a lot of people started to crowd around these two big picnic tables. You ladies mind just.

[Crystal Brown]

I am not gonna make not one comment until I eat.

[Matt Kilty]

Oh, no, no, no. No comment. Which is where I met 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. Cause I'm just.

[Crystal Brown]

What's on the table?

[Matt Kilty]

Yeah, just what's on the table.

[Crystal Brown]

Are you mean this table?

[Matt Kilty]

This table right here.

[Crystal Brown]

So I think you have tea, you have sweet tea, you have orange juice, and then you have your condiments for that. But on the breakfast table.

[Matt Kilty]

Oh, what's that? What's that?

[Crystal Brown]

You've got your eggs, you've got your grits, 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. So I'm excited.

[Matt Kilty]

All right. And can I get your name?

[Crystal Brown]

Sure. Geneva Reedville. I'm the mother of Sandra Bland, in.

[Matt Kilty]

Case you don't remember. July 10, 2015.

[Crystal Brown]

Hello, ma' am with the tanks.

[Matt Kilty]

Highway patrol, the reason for your stop is you.

[Natasha Clemens]

You didn't fail.

[Ben Montgomery]

You failed to signal your lane change. Got your driver's license, insurance with you? Give me a few minutes.

[Matt Kilty]

All right. Sandra Bland is pulled over in a small town in Texas. The cop runs, her, information comes back to the car. You mind putting out your cigarette?

[Ben Montgomery]

Please don't mind.

[Natasha Clemens]

I'm in my car. Why do I have to put out my cigarette?

[Ben Montgomery]

Well, you can step on out now.

[Crystal Brown]

I don't have to step out of my car.

[Ben Montgomery]

Step out of the car. Step out of the car.

[Crystal Brown]

No, you don't have the right.

[Matt Kilty]

Step out of the car.

[Crystal Brown]

You do not have the right to do that.

[Matt Kilty]

I do have the right. Step out or I will remove you.

[Crystal Brown]

I am getting removed for a failure.

[Matt Kilty]

Step out or I will remove you. I'm giving you a lawful order.

[Crystal Brown]

Don't touch me.

[Ben Montgomery]

Get out of the car.

[Crystal Brown]

Don't touch me. I'm not under arrest. You don't have the right to say.

[Matt Kilty]

You are under arrest.

[Crystal Brown]

I'm under arrest for what?

[Matt Kilty]

Get out of the car and then I will light you up. Get out.

[Mike Chitwood]

Wow.

[Matt Kilty]

Now, eventually, Sandra gets out of the.

[Crystal Brown]

Car for a failure to signal. You're doing all of this.

[Ben Montgomery]

Get over there.

[Crystal Brown]

You're about to break my wrist.

[Natasha Clemens]

Can you stop?

[Crystal Brown]

You are motherfucking from. Stop moving. Stop now.

[Matt Kilty]

Stop it. Sandra was eventually taken to jail. Four days later in that jail cell, she was found dead, hanged with a plastic garbage bag. The death was ruled a suicide and Sandra's family disputed that ruling.

[Crystal Brown]

You got everything you want to have to get nice, good and full on today. So I'm excited.

[Matt Kilty]

Can I get your name? Sure.

[Crystal Brown]

Geneva Reedville. I'm the mother of Sandra Bland.

[Matt Kilty]

Sandra Bland?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Matt Kilty]

Where are you coming from?

[Natasha Clemens]

Chicago.

[Matt Kilty]

I want to let you eat your food. One thing I wanted to ask. Have you come. Have you come to events like this before?

[Crystal Brown]

Oh, yes, sir.

[Natasha Clemens]

Quite a few.

[Crystal Brown]

I was in Missouri last week. We go all around. We try to support as many mothers as we can because it's important.

[Matt Kilty]

And is that exactly like. Is that what it is? Is it really just like a support group?

[Crystal Brown]

Yes, sir.

[Natasha Clemens]

It's support.

[Crystal Brown]

It's support because that mother who has lost their baby needs to be able to see. 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.

[Matt Kilty]

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.

[Ben Montgomery]

It sucked to lose somebody to cancer. I've lost a friend to cancer recently, in fact. It's a horrible thing and a very, you know, 10 times, 100 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, you know, in a position of authority.

[Matt Kilty]

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 double grief.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, it's like past and present at the same time.

[Robert Krulwich]

Like you can't put it away because every day is another insult kind of.

[Matt Kilty]

Right. As soon as something happens again, this is Crystal Brown.

[Crystal Brown]

Somebody, one of us is reaching out, whoever's like closest, like say if something happened in, you know, here in Florida, we're Florida. We're going to reach out to each other and then we're going to invite them in. We say this is like the club that nobody really wants to be a part of. It's crazy, but it's his family. I said family is more than just blood. This is my family. And I could not have made it this far. I couldn't still be fighting. I wouldn't be doing anything if it wasn't for them.

[Matt Kilty]

So after the event ended at the community center, Crystal took a bunch of the moms, they all got in their cars and drove over to this like little gem shop. Do you guys do this after every event or is this just like. Crystal knows this one's around.

[Crystal Brown]

It's just Crystal knows this one's around here and has been telling everyone about this.

[Matt Kilty]

This is DeAndre Joseph. Her son Andrew died in 2014.

[Crystal Brown]

So no, we didn't know anything about this but figured this must be part of the different type of learning.

[Matt Kilty]

This is a part of just coping and grieving.

[Crystal Brown]

Right, right. We're all just simply trying to find our way.

[Matt Kilty]

And so 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.

[Crystal Brown]

You can either get the large stage.

[Matt Kilty]

At a certain point. Crystal was talking to these two women and she just had this big bundle of sage in her hand. Okay. Yeah.

[Crystal Brown]

Cause like if you want to do like your house like a, like a, like some deep shit like then I open my windows and I just. You really? I go through my house.

[Matt Kilty]

She says the sage calms her down.

[Crystal Brown]

You know, I'm just.

[Matt Kilty]

And then they went from the gem shop over to Crystal's house.

[Crystal Brown]

She calls me balls. Oh Lord. Wow.

[Matt Kilty]

Mid sized one story house into land.

[Crystal Brown]

And.

[Matt Kilty]

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 them chicken.

[Crystal Brown]

The oven got them good the other day. Yeah, the oven gonna get em good.

[Matt Kilty]

And one thing that caught me by surprise is how these women, when they come together, 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 have fun.

[Crystal Brown]

That's all you gonna hear. That's all you gonna hear.

[Matt Kilty]

Apparently, the night before, they'd all gone out dancing together.

[Crystal Brown]

Thank you, Buzz.

[Matt Kilty]

Okay.

[Crystal Brown]

I just want to stay close.

[Matt Kilty]

There was some earth, wind, and fire.

[Natasha Clemens]

And now what we're doing, instead of.

[Matt Kilty]

Getting motel rooms again, this is Natasha Clemens.

[Natasha Clemens]

We starting to stay over at each other's houses. We sleep in each other's bed, on each other's couch, you know, air mattresses. It becomes like a huge sleepover. And versus us going to sleep, we're up talking, you know, getting to know each other, you know, telling stories about yourselves as children. So it's like therapy for us.

[Matt Kilty]

Vicky's letting 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 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.

[Crystal Brown]

So when you see the video, that street that we just came down, that's the video.

[Matt Kilty]

That's the street.

[Crystal Brown]

And then he turns. Marlon turns here, and he comes in. Model car was probably over, like, right there. And then the police car that came behind him was probably right here. And then the officer that hit him came in. And then we can walk. We came in, and he came right here. And that's why they call it execution in the vegetable garden, because their garden was here and vegetables were growing. And all they had onions then, because when they. When they. You know, when they took him away and released it and took down the tape and stuff, we came back here. That's all you could smell was onions. And so now, like, when you cut, like, it's not. It's not as bad now, but just the association, like. So when I'm cutting onions, you get that smell like it just. You get those flat. Mm.

[Matt Kilty]

It just brings you right back here.

[Natasha Clemens]

Mm.

[Matt Kilty]

Yep. And the 12 of us just kind of stood there for a minute. Crystal's eyes were starting to get teary. Some of the other women started to cry, And then. Y' all want me to take some?

[Crystal Brown]

Yeah. My phone ain't the best. Somebody with a better phone than me.

[Matt Kilty]

A couple women handed me their phones.

[Crystal Brown]

Mine is broke.

[Natasha Clemens]

It don't look like it's gonna do.

[Crystal Brown]

Right, but it Will.

[Matt Kilty]

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, thank you. I think we got him. Then we all started walking back up to the cars.

[Natasha Clemens]

Crystal, I just want to thank you.

[Crystal Brown]

For just sharing that with us, because I know it has to be pretty.

[Natasha Clemens]

Hard to even come back to the site.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Crystal Brown]

Like I said, we have. We haven't been out here in a long. It's been a while. But we'll go to the Grave Saint. We used to go there once a week at night. At night. Three o' clock in the morning. That's why I remember. Deanna. I used to tell you all the time, how do you live so far away from him? Oh, my gosh. That would.

[Natasha Clemens]

That was. Yeah, my son.

[Mike Chitwood]

Sun's great.

[Crystal Brown]

It's about 15 minutes tops from where I live. Every time I visit home, I have to go there and spend some time. Of course. Yeah, of course. How could you not.

[Matt Kilty]

Right?

[Crystal Brown]

And it ain't no quick. Like, you want to go take a chair and sit there.

[Matt Kilty]

Yeah.

[Crystal Brown]

And it's crazy because, like, it's a. With some. 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 with his chair everything, like, set up. Like, he literally. I'm thinking he does he, like, go and have lunch with her every day? Like, that has to be. I don't know if it's. It's the cemetery that's way out, like, going towards Popeyes and all of that. It's a little white guy that's always sitting out there. He take his chair. Like he have a whole little setup, I would think. I never stopped to ask him, but I'm like, man, like.

[Matt Kilty]

So that trip to Florida was almost about a year ago, and I felt like I happened to be there at this point. Really interesting moment, because just a few months after that trip, Geneva Reed Veal, who was the mother of Sandra Bland, who I met, she spoke at the Democratic National Convention one year ago yesterday.

[Crystal Brown]

I lived the worst nightmare anyone could imagine.

[Matt Kilty]

She was on stage with Michael Brown's mother, Eric Garner's mother.

[Crystal Brown]

I watched as my daughter was lowered into the ground.

[Matt Kilty]

And it was around this time that a few of these women started to call themselves the mothers of the movement.

[Crystal Brown]

When I say mothers, you say mother Movement.

[Matt Kilty]

Some of them showed up at the women's march in D.C. mothers of the movement.

[Crystal Brown]

Louder. I want our kids. And heavens are here mothers. Absolutely.

[Matt Kilty]

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, a support group had suddenly become a fort.

[Jad Abumrad]

Coming up.

[Police Officer]

Put it down.

[Jad Abumrad]

A cop with a gun. A man with a knife.

[Police Officer]

Put the knife down. Put it down.

[Jad Abumrad]

And a look at the razor thin life or death moment between them.

[Police Officer]

Put it down or you're gonna get it again.

[Robert Krulwich]

So stay with.

[Crystal Brown]

Foreign.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Christopher calling from South Florida. Radiolab is supported in part by the.

[Crystal Brown]

Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding.

[Jad Abumrad]

Of science and technology in the modern world. More information about [e-mail]. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

And just. Let's just pick right back up with.

[Matt Kilty]

Our story from Florida with Tampa Bay.

[Robert Krulwich]

Times reporter Ben Montgomery and our own Matt Kilty.

[Matt Kilty]

All right, so day two, day two was Daytona. 1153, May 3rd.

[Jad Abumrad]

Daytona Beach.

[Matt Kilty]

Daytona beach, that's about everything.

[Ben Montgomery]

And what happened was we went to this thing with these women, mostly black, who have lost people to police violence. And I'm sitting across the table from an African American city councilman in Daytona beach. And I told him what I'd been working on. I told him some. Some of the numbers we'd learned. And he said, you really need to meet our police chief.

[Mike Chitwood]

You guys want me to run down and get a shower since you guys are.

[Matt Kilty]

His name is Mike Chitwood.

[Mike Chitwood]

You're not filming?

[Matt Kilty]

No, just. Yeah, just a microphone. He's the police chief of Daytona beach.

[Ben Montgomery]

Known for its wild and raucous spring break scenes. They have Bike week that draws 500,000 bikers from all over the country and Daytona International.

[Matt Kilty]

So.

[Ben Montgomery]

And on top of that, the permanent population there is like 62,000 people. And over that six year period, they've only had four police shootings.

[Jad Abumrad]

And that's low.

[Matt Kilty]

Yeah, for a city like that, that's really low. Jesse.

[Mike Chitwood]

I need to break down for 2015.

[Matt Kilty]

And in fact, while we were there.

[Mike Chitwood]

By race of tickets and arrest, Tiowood.

[Matt Kilty]

Had his assistant print out these spreadsheets. Here we go. Are those the stats? Yep. Thank you.

[Mike Chitwood]

We don't have to do the math.

[Matt Kilty]

And these spreadsheets are actually kind of fascinating because if you look at them.

[Mike Chitwood]

You know, you can just go right down here and you can add them.

[Matt Kilty]

Up for things like aggravated assault, theft, shoplifting, speeding.

[Mike Chitwood]

Our arrest ratio and our ticket ratio basically mirrors our city in Terms of racial demographics, yeah, we're roughly a 60, 40 city, 60% white, 40% African American.

[Matt Kilty]

And so when you look at these numbers, that's pretty much what you see. Tickets for speeding, about 60, 40. Arrests for theft, about 60, 40.

[Mike Chitwood]

That's the way we're supposed to, in theory, approach the law.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so what are they doing differently?

[Matt Kilty]

Well, a whole bunch of things.

[Mike Chitwood]

First of all, when all these incidents were occurring around the country with Ferguson and everything else, we did a race and policing, mandatory training for the entire pd. And basically what we wanted our officers to do is, number one, learn the history of the country. Because the history of the country is that we are a racist nation, no matter how you want to look at it. 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, when you look at slavery, when you look at Bull Connor, for example, turning the dogs and fire hoses loose on civil rights marchers. 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 a way 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 if it's a trick, I don't know if any of us know how to contain that. How do we stop that bias from coming through when you make a decision?

[Matt Kilty]

And I think I've read a lot about implicit bias. And it always seems 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.

[Mike Chitwood]

When you look at some of the shootings that were caught on video, and I think of the poor school janitor who lost his life in Minnesota.

[Matt Kilty]

Oh, yeah, the Flannica Steel shooting. Yeah.

[Mike Chitwood]

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. So the minute that young man tells that officer, 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 with his Kid, his girlfriend in the car, and he's telling me he's a gun permit holder. This is an 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 guy reaching for his pocket and I shoot him. And I would like to tell you, in all my years in policing, I would like to sit here and be naive and tell you that we don't shoot on armed people. As a 28 year practitioner of law enforcement, a 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 you know, 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? And you're looking at what are we doing?

[Matt Kilty]

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 heightened fear or this perceived threat?

[Mike Chitwood]

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 anecdotal, very quickly, when I first joined the 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 be retrained on how to keep your finger on the side plate of the weapon, not on the trigger, so that 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. Well, in reality, what it did was it slowed down your field division. It slowed everything down. That split second didn't make a difference. And that blink of an eye didn't make a difference. It made a difference in you 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.

[Matt Kilty]

So you buy yourself a little bit of time. And this is the thing that Chitwick comes back to again and again is this idea of time in certain situations.

[Mike Chitwood]

Slow down when you're dealing with a mentally ill person.

[Matt Kilty]

Slow down, like whatever you can do, use cover. Just create some space to buy yourself another 30 seconds.

[Mike Chitwood]

That extra 30 seconds may be the difference between saving your life and somebody else's life.

[Matt Kilty]

Another interesting thing was, and Ben found this out also through some of his reporting with other police chiefs. And is the idea that some police chiefs don't like to hire kids out of high school like 19, 20 year olds, in part because everything they do is this. They text a lot.

[Mike Chitwood]

That's all they know how to communicate. It's like this. And when they look up and go to talk to somebody, and I'm serious about going through the drive through at McDonald's and they could piss off the person ordering a cheeseburger. How did you do it? It's just their demeanor. It's just the way they act.

[Matt Kilty]

In fact, Ben told me that he talked to a different police chief who.

[Ben Montgomery]

Told him the young people who are coming into the academy the past few years have never been in a physical.

[Matt Kilty]

Fight, which is a problem because when they get into a fight, their heart starts to race and their muscles tense up and they don't really know what to do.

[Ben Montgomery]

So they freak out and they're way more likely to draw a weapon and use the weapon to, you know, to end the confrontation.

[Robert Krulwich]

So how do you deal? You can't ask her, how many times have you beat somebody up or been beaten up on your resume?

[Matt Kilty]

No, no. So that Ben says that that's why the police chief told him he looks to hire bouncers.

[Robert Krulwich]

I see bouncers.

[Matt Kilty]

Or for Chipwood.

[Mike Chitwood]

He said, from just my little myopic world that I live in, we have an awful high number of men and women who served in the military. They are my best officers. They are level headed, they are well trained. They know how to follow the policy.

[Matt Kilty]

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 Chiwich.

[Mike Chitwood]

Says is 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.

[Matt Kilty]

You have to get to know people.

[Mike Chitwood]

Yeah, let me. Come on.

[Matt Kilty]

All right, sure. And so to make this point, Chitwood got up, walked me down the hall to another office. There you go. All right. Sat me down on a computer.

[Mike Chitwood]

The sound comes on about 20 seconds.

[Matt Kilty]

Okay. To show me this video. So video starts in silence. And it's a body cam video. It's a body cam on the Cop who is driving a squad car.

[Mike Chitwood]

He's got his body cameras mounted to.

[Matt Kilty]

His eye on his glasses.

[Mike Chitwood]

So the camera's going where his eyes go.

[Matt Kilty]

Next to him, passenger side, is his partner. Both cops are white. Also, it's night, so the call is.

[Mike Chitwood]

For a guy who's running around with a knife trying to stab people. He was off his meds. I think he was on a crack cocaine binge, if I remember correctly. They park.

[Matt Kilty]

It's a little neighborhood street, and you can see down the street half a block away.

[Police Officer]

No, man.

[Matt Kilty]

This shirtless black guy.

[Police Officer]

Why don't you chill out, Derek?

[Matt Kilty]

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, and he's walking towards the cops.

[Police Officer]

Won't you stop acting so crazy?

[Matt Kilty]

Black guy gets closer and closer and closer. And finally the cop wearing the body cam pulls out a Taser. The other officer, who's out of the.

[Mike Chitwood]

Frame is behind him with his firearm out.

[Police Officer]

And the guy, put your fucking knife down. Put it down.

[Mike Chitwood]

Is approaching, approaching, approaching, approaching.

[Police Officer]

Put your knife down. Put the knife down. Put it down.

[Matt Kilty]

He gets within, like, 10ft of the cops, and then.

[Police Officer]

Taser, Taser, Taser, taser.

[Matt Kilty]

The guy with the body cam fires the Taser. The guy holding the knife, he falls onto his back onto this, like, cement driveway. He's still got the knife in his hand.

[Police Officer]

Put it down or you're gonna get it again. Put it down or you're gonna get it again.

[Matt Kilty]

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 detained.

[Police Officer]

Central Kofor cuffs him, and then, Derek, man, it's not a smart idea to have a knife coming at the police.

[Mike Chitwood]

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?

[Police Officer]

You're real lucky you didn't get shot.

[Mike Chitwood]

I wanted to.

[Crystal Brown]

I was trying my best.

[Police Officer]

You were trying your best to get shot?

[Matt Kilty]

I want to see if I can get.

[Police Officer]

You want to die?

[Mike Chitwood]

I want to see if I can.

[Police Officer]

You want to die?

[Crystal Brown]

I can't.

[Matt Kilty]

Huh? I can't.

[Police Officer]

You can't die.

[Mike Chitwood]

He tells the officer, goes, I'm Jesus Christ. And I want everybody to know the police bullets can't kill me.

[Police Officer]

I know you can't. All right, Derek, we gonna stand up? All right? Count of three. One, two, three.

[Matt Kilty]

So the two cops Pick him up, walk him over to the squad car, put them in. And the video ends, huh? So this is the thing that you guys. You use this video for what exactly?

[Mike Chitwood]

This is one of a 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 tries to stab one of them. 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 with that Taser.

[Police Officer]

Taser, Taser, Taser, Taser, Taser.

[Matt Kilty]

And this is important because the guy's partner who was holding a gun, had he heard this pop, he might have just instinctively reacted, thinking that was a gunshot, and fired his gun.

[Mike Chitwood]

So, you know, he's deploying the Taser. And communication is key. 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 the one officer in particular knew that individual from prior contact.

[Matt Kilty]

Right. I mean, it's interesting to hear him say the name Derek.

[Mike Chitwood]

Right?

[Matt Kilty]

It's like Derek is Derek, and Derek isn't just a black man shirtless with a knife in his hand.

[Mike Chitwood]

When there's no connection there, it's a lot easier to see somebody as 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.

[Matt Kilty]

Actually, after we finished watching that video and I was packing up, Chitwood told me that just a couple months after that incident, I'm biking through the neighborhood.

[Mike Chitwood]

And my man sitting on the front step waves at me, hey, Chitwood, how you doing, man?

[Matt Kilty]

Derek does.

[Mike Chitwood]

You stupid son of a bitch. You don't know how close you came to being dead. But he was back on his medication, wasn't doing drugs, and he was completely as normal as me and you are right now.

[Matt Kilty]

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.

[Crystal Brown]

Among the big winners, Daytona Beach's police chief. He is now Volusia County's new sheriff.

[Matt Kilty]

Mike Chitwood was elected the sheriff of Volusia County.

[Mike Chitwood]

I am extremely humbled I am extremely honored.

[Matt Kilty]

Which is the county that Daytona beach belongs to.

[Jad Abumrad]

Huh.

[Matt Kilty]

And the other thing to mention is that Chitwood 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. Hmm. Now, just a month after PERF put out those principles, two of the biggest policing organizations in the world, the iacp, 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 or 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.

[Ben Montgomery]

First time, I think you're seeing these massive conversations. The police weren't talking about this two or three years ago, huh?

[Jad Abumrad]

I don't know, man. Just thinking about this, like, 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 the way policing is done in America, or at least maybe slowly.

[Matt Kilty]

Right.

[Jad Abumrad]

But cumulatively it does. I hesitate to use this word, but it does make. It does feel like reason for hope.

[Matt Kilty]

Right. And I sort of felt the same way too. But there was this experience Ben and I had where I just realized how far hope has to go. We are here to see Natasha Clemens.

[Ben Montgomery]

Natasha Clemens, the mother of Rodney Mitchell.

[Matt Kilty]

Okay, so Natasha's a woman who you heard earlier back at the community Center.

[Natasha Clemens]

I've met 400 other mothers who's lost their children.

[Matt Kilty]

That's actually when I first met her. 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. Cuz 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, Oh no. She just started sobbing. And Ben and I just had no idea what had happened. Eventually I just turned the tape recorder off.

[Jad Abumrad]

Huh. So what was happening in that moment?

[Matt Kilty]

Well, okay, so to back up. 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 chitwood, a sheriff, 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 during a traffic stop. After the shooting, a judge ruled that the two officers had done nothing wrong. They had acted in accordance with the law. And it just so happened that 45 minutes before Ben and I showed up at her door, she'd just gotten an email from her lawyers 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, big smile, big.

[Natasha Clemens]

Smile, bright white smile.

[Matt Kilty]

And then we sat down at her kitchen table. Okay, so if you can walk me back to the night that kind of everything.

[Natasha Clemens]

Everything happened June 11, 2012. Natasha was at home 9:30 at night.

[Matt Kilty]

Rodney, who, who was 23 years old, was back from college and out driving Natasha's car.

[Natasha Clemens]

That's when all the phone calls started happening. People calling, 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, you know, 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.

[Matt Kilty]

Eventually, a family member actually picks her up. They drive to the scene. She gets there.

[Natasha Clemens]

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, Natasha, he's over there.

[Matt Kilty]

She pointed about 20ft over to where the car had come to a stop. It had collided with a gas station.

[Natasha Clemens]

But then she had the back of my loop of my pants so that I couldn't run over there.

[Matt Kilty]

The whole place was surrounded by police tape. And eventually Natasha says it took a couple hours, but a cop pulled her off to the side and told her that her son had been shot and killed by police.

[Natasha Clemens]

I just got on my hands and knees and started praying. Don't let this be true. Please, Lord. I was basically begging and pleading. That's the only thing I could do. What else do you do? Cry, scream, pray, cry, scream, pray, cry, scream, pray. Next thing you Know, I woke up, I was at the hospital.

[Matt Kilty]

Natasha says that she apparently was so frenzied that an EMT on the scene stuck her with something to calm me down.

[Natasha Clemens]

So when I woke up, I see my family standing over me in the hospital.

[Matt Kilty]

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.

[Ben Montgomery]

Yeah, Rodney.

[Matt Kilty]

According to all these documents, that night Rodney and his 16 year old cousin were in Natasha's car. They had stopped at a gas station. They had left the gas station and were driving down this highway wind.

[Ben Montgomery]

He and his little cousin get pulled over by two white officers. The officer said he saw him without a seatbelt. Turns out Rodney was wearing a seatbelt. And these two officers approach his vehicle. One is kind of standing in front.

[Matt Kilty]

Of the car about several feet away, towards like the driver's side.

[Ben Montgomery]

And the officer approaches his window.

[Matt Kilty]

According to Rodney's cousin, he says, boy.

[Ben Montgomery]

Why didn't 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.

[Matt Kilty]

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 into drive, accelerated at the officer in front of the car. Rodney's cousin gives two conflicting accounts as to 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 into the windshield. The deputy right by the door.

[Ben Montgomery]

Here's the fire. He pulls a gun and fires twice.

[Matt Kilty]

One bullet went through Rodney's left hand, which he'd put up in self defense. Another bullet entered through his left and.

[Ben Montgomery]

The car lurches forward and careens across.

[Matt Kilty]

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 dead at the scene.

[Natasha Clemens]

My mind is always on Rodney.

[Matt Kilty]

Natasha says when she does think about that night, she always comes back to this one question.

[Natasha Clemens]

Why were the guns pulled? Why? Why what? Why was that? What was that all about?

[Matt Kilty]

What do you think the answer is?

[Natasha Clemens]

He's black. And that's just it.

[Matt Kilty]

Is there ever a moment where you try and put yourself in the mind of those two officers?

[Natasha Clemens]

Absolutely not. Because I would never do somebody's kid like that. That never crossed. No, I would never do that.

[Matt Kilty]

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?

[Natasha Clemens]

No, he's a bully. Hell, if he. If somebody gets hurt or somebody gets injured or killed, he's gonna get off. He's behind that blue badge. He's a bully.

[Matt Kilty]

Is that what you think of cops, like, writ large?

[Natasha Clemens]

That's how it is. That's exactly how it is. No if, ands and buts about it.

[Matt Kilty]

Because it's hard for me. Cause I think, like. 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, well, I don't know. I couldn't give you a percentage, but a number of officers in which, like, yes, they are probably violent individuals who don't belong in a police force. But I would assume that, like, a majority of the cops mean well, have. Probably. Probably have some sort of bias where they don't think, I see a black person and I'm gonna, like, I'm gonna get that boy. But that there's, like a. Like there's 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, there's like, a whole host of factors leading to these police moments where somebody is shot and killed. It's not just that they're out here bullying people.

[Natasha Clemens]

You say that because you're. You're white. That's why you say that. I tell you what, I tell you what. We can try this. Go to my sister. We'll make sure we get you a wig. Go to a tennis lawn, get yourself sprayed black, and I guarantee you, you'll get a different response. I dare you. Try it. 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.

[Matt Kilty]

Like, sitting, like, sitting there in that moment, I felt the gulf. And I just kept wondering, like, how long does it take to fill that gulf? How many chitwoods does it take? How many conversations need to happen? In any case, do you want us to. Ben still had to give Natasha those files on Rodney to get those documents for you.

[Crystal Brown]

I'd appreciate it.

[Matt Kilty]

Sure. Okay. Yeah. Oh, sorry. So Ben grabbed this huge folder of paper out of the trunk of our car, walked back inside.

[Ben Montgomery]

So this is not everything.

[Matt Kilty]

Ben put the stack of Ronnie's files on this glass kitchen table, took out.

[Ben Montgomery]

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.

[Mike Chitwood]

I don't want.

[Ben Montgomery]

To, I don't want to have the. I don't want to re. Traumatize you. And they're graphic, just frankly, they're graphic, you know, so I'll leave it up to you and you don't have to tell me right now.

[Natasha Clemens]

Yeah, when I'm ready, I'll get them. That's something that I'm gonna have to eventually see.

[Matt Kilty]

Three days later, Natasha contacted Ben and said that she was ready to see those photos.

[Crystal Brown]

Sam.

[Robert Krulwich]

Huge thanks to Ben Montgomery of the Tampa Bay Times and to the staff of the paper that, that did all the hard work of gathering statistics and material.

[Jad Abumrad]

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, we'll make sure that we link to it when it's live from our.

[Matt Kilty]

Website, Radiolab.org and then of course, to.

[Robert Krulwich]

Our own Matt Kilty, who reported and produced this piece.

[Jad Abumrad]

Next week, we'll bring you part two of Matt Kielty and Ben Montgomery's reporting. It's a very different kind of story. Check in for that.

[Matt Kilty]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm Jad Abumran.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Crystal Brown]

Thanks for listening.

[Mike Chitwood]

This is george washington iii in charlotte, north carolina. Radiolab is produced by jad abumrad. 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 farrell, david gable, matt kielty, robert krulwich, annie mckeown, lateef nassar, melissa o', donnell, arianne wack and molly webster, with help from tracy hunt, valentina bohanini, nigar fatali, phoebe wang and katie ferguson. Our fact checker is michelle harris.