Earlier this year, Neil Bedi, a reporter and developer on the Tampa Bay Times’ data and investigations team, produced “If You’re Black,” an interactive story exploring more than 800 officer-involved shootings that occurred in Florida between 2009 and 2014. The piece was part of a larger project named “Why Cops Shoot.”
Bedi and his colleague Connie Humburg, a computer assisted reporting specialist at the Times, showed that there were evident racial patterns in the numbers – black people were shot more often than whites. The breakdown of unarmed people shot by police skewed even more black, Bedi and Humburg report.
Storybench spoke with Bedi about how his team tackled the project and why less is more when it comes to marrying code and story.
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