WHY COPS SHOOT

Chuck Wexler is the  executive director of a group of police executives who study issues like use of force. He said a full third of police shootings nationwide are cases in which the suspect was unarmed or cases where police could have avoided putting themselves in harm’s way, like unnecessarily standing in front of a suspect’s car.

Most of the shootings seem justified. While millions of interactions are peaceful, we give police the authority to kill and the benefit of the doubt, and we expect them to use violence judiciously to protect the public and themselves. More often than not they do. And policing can be dangerous. In the same six years, 23 officers were killed in the state, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

But then there are cases like Rodney Mitchell’s.