A warning, this episode contains a graphic description of gun violence.

Every police related death, I mean it's like the person dies, their family is devastated,

it screws with the police officer that ends up doing it, it changes the culture of that squad, the whole community.

And then now as we've seen with these videos it can impact, you know, the stability of the country.

This is Death, Sex and Money.

The show from WNYC about the things we think about a lot, then you talk about more.

I'm Anna Sale.

In the past few years, Tom Baker has spent hundreds of hours reading about police shootings and watching videos of them.

If anything trends on the internet in terms of officer and all shootings, I've seen it.

So I spent a lot of time watching these videos.

Tom is a PhD student at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.

He's studying criminology and criminal justice, and he's focusing on police use of force.

He recently combed through every police related death in the United States in 2017, more than 1800 incidents, some of which were on camera.

And the goal is to identify patterns and maybe things that police are doing that could be changed in some fundamental way or maybe just tweaked in a slight way.

So that you reduce the number of officer involved shootings and police related deaths.

This research is personal for Tom because in 2009, while he was a police officer in Phoenix, Arizona, Tom shot and killed someone.

I've already spent so much time thinking about it.

And a lot of times it's not a choice to think about it.

It's always going to be something that you're going to think about.

So when I watch these, I find it like I'm doing something productive.

Is it hard for you to watch them?

No.

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