Writer and television host Touré on Sunday challenged conservative podcaster Kmele Foster after he downplayed killings by police by saying that "only 20" unarmed black were people gunned down last year.
While speaking to MSNBC's Joy Ann Reid, Foster argued that black athletes like Colin Kaepernick should not be the "tip of the spear" when it comes to ending systemic racism.
"The fact is there is a lot about the conversation about police reforms, police-involved shootings that I think is very unhealthy," Foster opined. "The fact is when people in a Black Lives Matter camp talk about things or someone takes a knee, the thinking is anyone who disagrees with their perspective does so because they don't care about black lives."
He continued: "I would say if you have a movement like this, you're interested in achieving reforms, it's not apparent that having Colin Kaepernick at the tip of your spear is good. He's going to inflame things that are hyperbolic and don't get to the heart of the issue."
Foster also downplayed the killing of African-Americans by police by pointing out that "only 20" unarmed black people were shot dead by law enforcement last year.
"We shouldn't be hysterical," he said. "Only about 68 of those people [killed by police in 2017] were unarmed and only 20 of those people were black. Thirty of them were white."
Foster's rant left Touré flummoxed.
"The core issue here is the killing, the wrongful killing of black people by agents of their government," Touré replied. "Colin Kaepernick is morally right -- indeed, has a moral imperative to speak about this when he has a platform. And the notion that you don't do this in your workplace really does not fit."
"When you have a case of life and death, one, two, three is far too many wrongfully killed by our government," he added. "My question is not why is Kaepernick saying so much, my question is why are not more people saying more? Because this is an incredibly important issue in modern America? Why would we settle for any number of black people being wrongfully killed by their own government?"
About 100 protesters, many wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “NRA = Not Real Activists,” marched through the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Dallas in May to slam the powerful gun lobby as too conciliatory on gun rights and rally for their candidate for the board.
Adam Kraut, a gun rights lawyer, fell about 4,000 votes short of the 71,000 needed for election, but earned 5,000 more than the previous year, a sign of the growth of the Second Amendment purists within the NRA known to many as “gundamentalists.”
With opinion polls showing U.S. public support for more gun control growing in the wake of mass shootings in recent years, the NRA is facing internal pressure from this little-known force that is demanding that the leadership concede zero ground to gun-control advocates.
Its rise has rattled the NRA leadership and threatens the association’s ability to hold on to moderate supporters and to make compromises that might help fend off tougher gun control measures, according to some of the two dozen gun-rights activists, policy experts and gun-control advocates interviewed for this story.
“Generally, they have a disproportionately huge amount of power in the gun-rights movement,” said Richard Feldman, a former NRA lobbyist.
The NRA has faced divisions before. An internal revolt at the 1977 meeting in Cincinnati turned the polite, sport-shooting organization into a bare-knuckled political lobby that today claims five million members and is closely aligned with the Republican Party, funding pro-gun politicians. The NRA, which spent $30 million to support Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, is often viewed by gun-control advocates as implacably opposed to tighter gun laws.
The NRA leadership has put up obstacles to Kraut’s election, both with bylaws that make it harder for candidates not put forward by the nominating committee to get elected to the board, and by enlisting a senior member to campaign against him.
Marion Hammer, a past president of the NRA and one of the group’s most successful lobbyists, denounced unsanctioned candidates in a column on the website Ammoland just as Kraut appeared on the 2018 ballot. Though Hammer did not name Kraut, he was one of only two non-approved candidates to run.
“Once again the NRA is being threatened by the enemy within,” Hammer wrote. “It is time to wake up and stop it before it begins.”
Neither the NRA nor Hammer responded to requests to address the influence of the gundamentalists and the criticism that these activists and other gun-rights groups directed at the lobby.
SOCIAL MEDIA PRESSURE
The Dallas protesters, almost all white men, included bearded outdoorsmen and buttoned-down libertarians. Some said they hid their T-shirts while entering the conventional hall for fear that NRA security would ban them.
Kraut, 31, who says he grew up in a house without guns but as an adult taught his father how to shoot, practices firearms law in suburban Philadelphia and also hosts a video blog called The Legal Brief on The Gun Collective, a YouTube channel.
He has campaigned for the NRA to push for even more expansive gun-rights laws. He wants to change NRA bylaws, such as imposing term limits for board members and mandatory meeting attendance, to renew its leadership.
“Some members feel it (the NRA) doesn’t go far enough to defend what we believe to be the core of the Second Amendment,” Kraut told Reuters.
One of Kraut’s most prominent supporters, Tim Harmsen, who led the pro-Kraut march through the convention center, has 770,000 subscribers to the Military Arms Channel on YouTube, where he criticizes the NRA for being weak on gun laws.
“We’re going to continue to apply pressure (on the NRA) every way that we can through social media and we’ll be there again next year,” Harmsen said.
These hardliners deeply cherish their right under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment to keep and bear arms. They oppose any form of gun control, saying criminals will find ways around gun laws, which only strip lawful gun owners of the right to self-defense and protection against state tyranny.
The gun-rights purists are outraged by any concessions the NRA makes in the wake of mass shootings, even if they are made to avoid stricter gun control laws. Opinion polls such as a regular Gallup survey show growing support for gun control in recent years. Within that trend, support for gun control typically spikes immediately after mass shootings, then falls closer to pre-massacre levels within a few months.
After a shooter killed 58 people at a country music concert in Las Vegas last year, the NRA supported federal regulation of bump stocks, accessories that the gunman used to fire his semiautomatic rifles more quickly. The Justice Department then ordered an effective ban that is close to being finalized.
Amid nationwide protests that followed a Florida high school shooting that killed 17 people in February, the NRA endorsed strengthening background checks for gun purchasers and emergency protection orders that allow law-enforcement officials to temporarily take guns away from people deemed dangerous.
“For us, some of the things that come out of NRA headquarters are just outrageous and abhorrent,” said Jeff Knox, a Kraut supporter whose father, Neal Knox, led the “Revolt at Cincinnati” in 1977. “It’s: Holy cow, what are these guys thinking?”
A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the constitutionality of two California laws restricting the ability of people to buy and carry firearms, rejecting appeals by gun rights advocates.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected challenges to Unsafe Handgun Act requirements that new semiautomatic pistols have chamber load indicators and magazine detachment mechanisms, both meant to limit accidental discharges, and microstamp their makes, models and serial numbers onto fired shell casings.
A different panel of the same court upheld a 2015 amendment to California’s Gun-Free School Zone Act that forbade concealed carry permit holders from possessing firearms on school grounds, while letting retired police and other “peace” officers do so.
Gun rights advocates said the handgun law violated their Second Amendment rights, and that both laws violated their Fourteenth Amendment equal protection rights.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The office of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, which defended the laws, did not immediately respond to a similar request.
California has some of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws. Becerra was among 19 state attorneys general this week to call on the Trump administration to block a private company’s planned online release of 3-D printed gun blueprints.
In the Unsafe Handgun Act decision, Circuit Judge Margaret McKeown wrote for a 2-1 majority that requiring new handguns to contain “modern technology” did not impose a substantial burden on gun buyers, and reasonably related to California’s interests in protecting public safety and tracing bullets at crime scenes.
Circuit Judge Jay Bybee dissented on the microstamping provision, saying in a 51-page opinion the plaintiffs’ Second Amendment claims should be taken “seriously.”
He said California’s “restrictive testing protocol” had since 2013 barred commercial sales of new handguns, allowing sales only of guns grandfathered from microstamping, and it was premature to say microstamping reasonably fit with California’s interest in solving handgun crimes.
In the 3-0 schools decision, Circuit Judge John Owens said California could rationally decide that retired peace officers could have firearms on school grounds for self-protection, based on their prior exposure to crime, and protect public safety.
He rejected a claim that the 2015 amendment was enacted to favor “politically powerful” retired officers and harm “politically unpopular” concealed carry permit holders.
Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Richard Chang
According to an amended lawsuit that the National Rifle Association has filed against the state of New York, their financial well-being is threatened by adverse influence levied on institutions doing business with them by influential state lawmakers.
The ABA Journals reports that lawyers for the NRA have added to their original lawsuit against the state claiming financial hardship because New York authorities are discouraging banks and insurers from doing business with them.
Blaming New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), the NRA said he has bullied outside businesses, resulting in a "concerted efforts to stifle the NRA’s freedom of speech and to retaliate against the NRA based on its viewpoints causing other insurance, banking, and financial institutions from doing business with the NRA."
The complaint states that such outside influence will make companies, "... rethink their mutually beneficial business relationships with the NRA for fear of monetary sanctions or expensive public investigations."
Based upon loss of income and reluctance of insurers to deal with them, the NRA contends "It has not been able to renew its media liability insurance. If the group cannot secure a policy soon, it could be forced to shutter its multimillion-dollar television network, NRA TV, or a number of its print publications."
Additionally the NRA contends that without insurance, it “cannot maintain its physical premises” or “convene off-site meetings and events.”
According to a new report on Maria Butina -- the Russian national being held by federal officials on charges of conspiracy and acting as a foreign agent in the U.S. --, she drunkenly bragged about working with the Kremlin in order to infiltrate the NRA.
CNN reports that government officials were alerted to what was once considered odd claims she made to classmates while attending graduate-level classes at American University, months before she was taken into custody.
According to the report, Butina admitted in class that she was a liaison between the Trump campaign and the Russians, claimed one CNN source at the school.
Others at the school stated that she became more brazen and confessional in her comments in the after-hours, admitting that she was working on gaining access to the National Rifle Association.
According to the report, "On at least two separate occasions she got drunk and spoke openly about her contacts within the Russian government, even acknowledging that Russian intelligence services were involved with the gun rights group she ran in Moscow."
Authorities were responding on Thursday to a report of an active shooter incident at a hospital on an Air Force base in Ohio, base officials said on Twitter.
Personnel at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, have been told to shelter in place until the incident is investigated, the base said.
Reporting by Makini Brice; Editing by Frances Kerry
Second Amendment activist Jan Morgan on Wednesday suggested that pornography can do more "harm" than guns created on a 3D printer.
During a panel discussion on CNN's New Day program, Las Vegas massacre survivor Brian Claypool said that he was "re-traumatized" when he learned that blueprints for untraceable guns could be downloaded online and printed in anyone's home. This week, a federal judge temporarily blocked the release of the blueprints from Defense Distributed, a Texas-based company.
"I was in despair," Claypool explained. "I was grieving again. I was re-victimized and re-traumatized."
Morgan, who declared her gun store a "Muslim-free zone" in 2014, argued that both the First and Second Amendments protect the right to download plans for 3D-printed plastic guns.
"If we're going to start censoring any information out there on the Internet that might do irreparable harm then we're going to have to take off all the websites that might be out there that teach you how to make explosive devices and bombs," she insisted. "Websites such as pornography, websites that teach people how to poison other people."
"I mean, there's a wealth of information out there that is very dangerous on the Internet," Morgan added. "So this is a First Amendment issue."
According to Morgan, it is easier to build a gun out of parts from a hardware store than it is to print one from downloaded blueprints.
"The 3D-printable firearms are much more complicated to make than just building your own," she said.
Claypool explained that bullets from the gun were "made to destroy" the body by breaking apart once they enter the victim.
Morgan laughed at the notion.
"It's not funny," Claypool complained. "You go dodge bullets."
"United States veterans have gone behind the lines of fire to defend liberty!" Morgan exclaimed.
"This isn't about liberty," Claypool shot back. "It's about public safety."
A U.S. judge on Tuesday blocked the planned release of 3-D printed gun blueprints hours before they were set to hit the internet, siding with states that sued to halt publication of designs to make weapons that security screening may not detect.
U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik in Seattle said the blueprints’ publication could cause irreparable harm to U.S. citizens. The decision blocked a settlement President Donald Trump’s administration had reached with a Texas-based company, which initially said it planned to put files online on Wednesday.
Gun control proponents are concerned the weapons made from 3-D printers are untraceable, undetectable “ghost” firearms that pose a threat to global security. Some gun rights groups say the technology is expensive, the guns are unreliable and the threat is being overblown.
Josh Blackman, a lawyer for the company Defense Distributed, said during Tuesday’s hearing that blueprints had already been uploaded to the firm’s website on Friday.
The publication of those files is now illegal under federal law, Lasnik said.
“There are 3-D printers in public colleges and public spaces and there is the likelihood of potential irreparable harm,” Lasnik said at the end of a one-hour hearing on the lawsuit.
Defense Distributed and its founder Cody Wilson, a self-declared anarchist, argued that access to the online blueprints is guaranteed under First and Second Amendment rights, respectively to free speech and to bear arms.
Lasnik said First Amendment issues had to be looked at closely and set another hearing in the case for Aug. 10. In a comment apparently directed at Wilson, the judge said breaking the law was something “anarchists do all the time.”
Blackman said in an interview he was disappointed in the court’s ruling and the judge’s comment.
“Mr. Wilson scrupulously obeys all court orders,” Blackman said, adding that he was awaiting the judge’s written order before deciding on further legal action.
Eight states and the District of Columbia on Monday filed a lawsuit against the federal government, arguing it acted arbitrarily in reaching the June settlement.
The states said online blueprints would allow criminals easy access to weapons. They said the Trump administration had failed to explain why it settled the case and that its decision violated their ability to regulate firearms and keep citizens safe.
Eric Soskin, a lawyer for the U.S. State Department, told the judge on Tuesday that the government’s role in the case was that of a bystander.
“As part of this decision, the United States has determined that the kind of guns you can go and buy in any store are not a threat to national security,” Soskin said of the settlement.
Defense Distributed’s files include 3-D printable blueprints for components that would go into the making of a version of the AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle, a weapon that has been used in many U.S. mass shootings.
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump raised concerns about the sale of plastic guns made with 3-D printers and said on Twitter he had talked with the powerful National Rifle Association lobbying group about the weapons.
“I am looking into 3-D Plastic Guns being sold to the public,” he said. “Already spoke to NRA, doesn’t seem to make much sense.”
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley later told reporters it’s illegal “to own or make a wholly plastic gun of any kind, including those made on a 3-D printer.”
The NRA followed suit.
“Regardless of what a person may be able to publish on the Internet, undetectable plastic guns have been illegal for 30 years,” Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, said in a statement.
The gun plans were pulled from the internet in 2013 by order of the U.S. State Department under international gun trafficking laws. Wilson sued in 2015, claiming the order infringed on his constitutional rights.
Wilson said in an online video that the blueprints were downloaded more than 400,000 times before they were taken down in 2013.
Reporting by Tina Bellon in New York, Susan Heavey, Susan Cornwell in Washington; Steve Holland; Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas; Editing by Grant McCool and Tom Brown
President Donald Trump on Tuesday raised concerns about the sale of plastic guns made with 3-D printers, a day after several U.S. states sued the Trump administration to block the online publication of designs for such printable weapons.
Eight states and Washington, D.C., on Monday filed a lawsuit to fight a June settlement between the federal government and Texas-based Defense Distributed allowing the company to legally publish its designs. Its downloadable plans are set to go online on Wednesday.
The legal wrangling is the latest fight over gun rights in the United States, which has faced a series of mass shooting in recent years that has re-ignited the long-simmering debate over access to firearms.
“I am looking into 3-D Plastic Guns being sold to the public,” Trump said in a Twitter post that referred to the powerful National Rifle Association lobbying group. “Already spoke to NRA, doesn’t seem to make much sense.”
Representatives for the U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The states, in their filing on Monday, argued the online plans will give criminals easy access to weapons by circumventing traditional sales and regulations.
Gun rights groups have been largely dismissive of concerns about 3-D printable guns, saying the technology is expensive and the guns unreliable.
The man accused of shooting five people to death last month at a newspaper office in Annapolis, Maryland, entered a plea of not guilty on Monday to all 23 felony charges against him, including five counts of first-degree murder.
The plea was entered on behalf of Jarrod Ramos, 38, by his lawyers in a filing with the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court, along with motions seeking a speedy jury trial and to obtain prosecution evidence through pretrial discovery.
The filing negated the need for Ramos to appear in person for arraignment, as scheduled, and he was not in court. He remains jailed without bond. The proceeding was later removed from the docket, according to Emily Morse, a spokeswoman for prosecutors.
Ramos is charged with opening fire in the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis on June 28 with a barrage of shotgun blasts, killing four journalists and a sales assistant in an attack police said was motivated by a long-standing grudge he held against the newspaper in Maryland’s state capital.
The community newspaper is owned by the Baltimore Sun. The killings rank as one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in U.S. history.
Ramos’ defense raised several procedural objections, including an assertion that identification of the defendant at trial would “be tainted as a result of impermissible suggestive identification procedures undertaken by police.”
Morse said a formal ID of Ramos was established through facial recognition technology. She denied as inaccurate reports that the suspect had mutilated his fingertips to avoid identification. She characterized the defense objections as “pretty standard” in such cases.
Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Peter Cooney
Five people were shot dead, including the suspected gunman, in a Friday night attack at a Texas nursing home and the home of one of the people slain, city officials said.
Police in Robstown, Texas, outside Corpus Christi, responded to reports of an active shooter at a nursing home about 7 p.m. local time (midnight GMT), where they found two men and a woman dead, said Herman Rodriguez, city secretary, in a video interview with the Caller Times of Corpus Christi.
Officers later found two more bodies at a home connected to one of the people slain at the nursing home, Rodriguez said.
“We do feel the crimes are related,” Rodriguez said.
Officials said the shooter was a male and that it was a murder-suicide.
A U.S. judge on Friday rejected a last-ditch effort by gun control groups to block the Trump administration from allowing the public to download blueprints for 3-D printable guns, declining to intervene just days before the designs are expected to go online.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman in Austin, Texas, denied the request for an order by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety and the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence at a hearing, saying he would state the reasons for his decision in a written order to follow.
At the hearing, the judge said he was sympathetic to the gun control groups’ concerns but questioned their legal standing to intervene in the case.
The groups sought to intervene following a June settlement between Defense Distributed and the U.S. government allowing the company to legally publish gun blueprints online, something its website says it plans to do by Aug. 1.
The government ordered the blueprints taken down in 2013 and Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson sued in 2015, claiming his First Amendment and Second Amendment rights had been violated.
The government had until recently argued the blueprints posed a national security risk. Gun control groups said there had been no explanation for the June settlement and the administration’s abrupt reversal on the issue.
Lawyers for the Brady Center declined to comment on Pitman’s ruling after the hearing.
The groups in court filings said not halting the blueprint distribution by a Texas-based company called Defense Distributed would “cause immediate and irreparable harm to the United States national security” and that of individual U.S. citizens.
“The stated goal of Defense Distributed is to sound the death knell for gun control,” David Cabello, a lawyer for the Brady Center, told Pitman during the hearing.
The 3-D files include blueprints for a plastic AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle, a weapon that has been used in many U.S. mass shootings, as well as other firearms.
Joshua Blackman, a lawyer for Defense Distributed, said he was grateful for the judge’s ruling. During the hearing Blackman said the gun control groups were trying to litigate a political dispute in court.
Wilson, a self-declared Texas anarchist, said in an online video that the blueprints were downloaded more than 400,000 times before they were taken down in 2013.
Lawrence Keane, general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association for gun manufacturers, told Reuters concerns over 3-D printable guns were overblown.
“I don’t see it likely at all that criminals will use this clunky and expensive technology,” Keane said. The NSSF is not involved in the case.
Reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin; Writing and additional reporting by Tina Bellon in New York; Editing by Susan Thomas and Dan Grebler
On Jan. 24, 2014, police found Josh Boren, a 34-year-old man and former police officer, dead in his home next to the bodies of his wife and their three children. The shots were fired execution-style on Boren’s kneeling victims, before he turned the gun on himself.
On Aug. 8, 2015, 48-year-old David Ray Conley shot and killed his son, former girlfriend and six other children and adults at his former girlfriend’s home. Like Boren, Conley executed the victims at point-blank range.
Both men had histories of domestic violence and criminal behavior. Yet despite the obvious similarities in these two cases and perpetrators, the media, in each case, took a different approach.
When describing Boren, the media focused on his good character and excellent parenting, going as far to call Boren a big “teddy bear” despite a prolonged history of domestic violence. They attributed his crime to “snapping” under the significant stress of his wife’s recent divorce filing.
In Conley’s case, media reports made little attempt to include any redeeming aspects of his personality. Instead, they focused exclusively on Conley’s history of domestic violence and prior drug possession charges. If you were to read articles about Conley, you would likely infer his crime stemmed from his inherently dangerous and controlling personality.
What might explain the differences in media coverage? Could it have something to do with the shooter’s race?
Boren, it turns out, was white; Conley was black.
In a recent study, we explored whether the race of mass shooters influences how the media depict their crime, their motivations and their lives.
We found that the discrepancies in the media coverage of Boren’s and Conley’s crimes were indicative of a broader phenomenon.
Explaining the crime, portraying the criminal
For the study, we randomly selected 433 online and print news articles covering 219 mass shootings from 2013 to 2015. While definitions of a mass shooting can vary, we adhered to the one most commonly used in empirical research: an event in which four or more people are shot, excluding the shooter.
Next, we created a unique data set based on information provided in the articles. We coded each article for a variety of variables associated with the crime and the shooter, including setting of the shooting, number and gender of victims killed and injured and age of the shooter.
After analyzing the data, we found that the shooter’s race could strongly predict whether the media framed him as mentally ill. (Less than 1 percent of the crimes had a female perpetrator.)
In all, about 33 percent of the articles in our study describing the crimes of a white shooter made a mention of mental illness. On the other hand, 26 percent of articles describing a Latino shooter and only two percent of articles describing a black shooter mentioned mental illness.
In fact – holding all aspects of the crime equal – white shooters were nearly 95 percent more likely to have their crimes attributed to mental illness than black shooters. Latino shooters were 92 percent more likely than black shooters to have mental illness mentioned as a factor.
An empathy gap
Furthermore, those articles that did describe a white shooter as mentally ill would often suggest that the shooter had been a generally good person who was a victim of society. The shooting, in other words, was out of character.
For example, in one case, a shooter in a rural trailer park set up a rifle in some bushes and began firing at the family trailer, with his wife, father-in-law and two young children inside. When the police arrived, he turned the rifle on them, hitting two officers before they gunned him down.
Yet subsequent news coverage noted his generally quiet demeanor and his willingness to help family and friends. The man who committed these crimes, one article noted, “wasn’t the same person who loved back-porch cookouts.”
However, such narratives – even within articles that mentioned mental illness – were less common when the shooter was black or Latino.
The graph below includes all news articles in our sample that framed a shooting as stemming from mental illness.
The chart shows the proportion of thematic narratives by race within the mental illness subsample.
Nearly 80 percent of articles that described white shooters as mentally ill also described them as a victim of society and circumstance – a tough childhood, a failed relationship or financial struggles.
However only one article that described a black shooter as mentally ill did the same. Furthermore, no article in our sample offered testimony to black shooters’ good character, suggested that the shooter was from a good environment or that the shooting was out of character. Across the board, roughly the same pattern played out with perpetrators who were Latino.
It seems as if media outlets tend to cast the violent acts of white criminals as unfortunate anomalies of circumstance and illness. For black shooters (and, to a lesser extent, Latino shooters) media outlets render their crimes with a brush of inherent criminality.
This isn’t to say that crimes shouldn’t be fully examined and that personal hardships and society don’t play a role. But if the circumstances of one group’s crimes are being explained in an empathetic way, and another group’s crimes aren’t given the same level of care and attention, we wonder whether this can insidiously influence how we perceive huge swaths of the population – criminal or not.
This isn’t to say that crimes shouldn’t be fully examined and that personal hardships and society don’t play a role. But if the circumstances of one group’s crimes are being explained in an empathetic way, and another group’s crimes aren’t given the same level of care and attention, we wonder whether this can insidiously influence how we perceive huge swaths of the population – criminal or not.