The "Criminal Mind" Calculator

Published in

On The Media

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Over the last decade, many courts also have started using algorithm-based predictive tools to determine how long or even whether a convict should be sentenced to jail. Julia Angwin, a senior reporter at ProPublica, scrutinized one of the most used risk assessment tools, Northpointe. A self-described math geek, she was seeking some high-stakes numbers to explore.

JULIA ANGWIN:  What I realized was the highest stakes for an algorithm was this one that was basically used to determine whether you were risky enough to be set free.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So why Northpointe's algorithm, specifically?

JULIA ANGWIN:  Yeah, so when I started looking into risk assessment scores, the first thing I realized was there were dozens of them. States build their own, academics build their own. Some of them are open source. There were two sort of national commercial vendors, Northpointe and another one, Multi-Health Systems. For the story to be national in scope, I wanted to pick one of those two, and so I chose Northpointe.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  How does it work?

JULIA ANGWIN:  The way risk assessments work is you’re arrested and they ask you a whole bunch of questions. Some of them are about your criminal record, your work history, your employment status, your family - have they been in jail – what kind of neighborhood do you live in? A lot of these reflect theories of criminality, which is that if you live in an unstable environment, you're more likely to commit crime.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  They do not ask about race.

JULIA ANGWIN:  No, they haven't asked about race since, I think, about the ‘70s. There were early risk-assessment tools that did ask about race, but that became very uncool [LAUGHS] during the civil rights era.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Aha. They do ask some sort of intriguing questions like, agree or disagree with this statement: A hungry person has a right to steal.

JULIA ANGWIN:  Yeah, the one that you’re reading from is the Northpointe Criminal Thinking Score. The thinking behind that [LAUGHS] was the idea that the judge might choose, if you have a high criminal thinking score, to offer you some mental health counseling.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

JULIA ANGWIN:  There's an idea behind the risk assessment movement that these are going to be used for treatment.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  A hungry person has a right to steal, agree or disagree. I don’t know whether that suggests you have a criminal mind or, or that you're just a liberal.

JULIA ANGWIN:  Correct. You could definitely see it that way.

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

Also, my question is, let’s say I'm sitting in a cell and somebody [LAUGHS] comes to me with a little clipboard and they say, agree or disagree, a hungry person has a right to steal. Perhaps it's an IQ test because [LAUGHS] I think the answer you should give is no.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Okay, now you found in your study, which you made of Broward County, Florida, that they were equally inaccurate, whether you're talking about a white defendant or a black one.

JULIA ANGWIN:  That's right. They were right about 60 percent of the time, for both blacks and whites, when it came to predicting whether they would commit another crime during the next two years. However, they were twice as likely to misclassify a black defendant as high risk when they weren't, and they were twice as likely to misclassify a white defendant as low risk when they weren't.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  I mean, obviously, anecdotes are just anecdotes, but you offer a couple of them to sort of illustrate your findings, which are kind of mind blowing. You want to share one?

JULIA ANGWIN:  Sure. We chose two people who had a very similar crime, which was petty theft.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  They’d both stolen about 80 bucks’ worth of stuff.

JULIA ANGWIN:  Yes. So the girl, a young 18-year-old black girl, she had picked up a kid’s Huffy bicycle and Razor scooter, she and her friend, out of somebody's yard, tried to ride them, realized that they were too big, gave them back to the mother who had come to ask for them back. But the neighbor had called the cops, so she was arrested and she was given a high-risk score, 10 out of 10, the highest possible risk. We compared her case with this guy who was a white man who was older. He had shoplifted about $80 worth of stuff, and he had already served a five-year term for armed robbery. He had another armed robbery under his belt. And he was given a score of 3 out of 10, low risk.

So we followed what happened in the two years after they were scored. He was arrested for stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics from a warehouse and he’s serving a nine-year sentence right now in state prison. And she has not been arrested at all.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And you found that only 20 percent of people predicted to commit violent crimes actually went on to do so.

JULIA ANGWIN:  Nobody would say that's a, a good result. In fact, there was a time when psychologists were brought in to assess future violence, and they only had a success rate of about 53 percent. And so, actually, that was used to justify not having psychologists do this. So the idea that this is a measure that has replaced that, that is only 20 percent accurate, is shocking.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But the driving force behind these risk assessments wasn’t to help in sentencing, right?

JULIA ANGWIN:  Right. The people who create them talk about how they really want to identify the issues that people who are entering the criminal justice system face and allow them to get treatment for those issues. The Northpointe is a very good example of that. That founder said that's what he came up with it for. But it is used in sentencing throughout Wisconsin and other states, much of upstate New York. In Wisconsin, the Northpointe score was actually challenged in a case recently, where the defendant said it wasn't fair that it was used in his sentencing. And the founder of Northpointe testified that he had not intended it to be used for sentencing.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And it isn't just Northpointe. There are lots of states that are using all kinds of risk assessments in sentencing, including Arizona, Louisiana, Washington. You cite the case of Paul Zilly. The first time he knew he had a score was when he was in court and [LAUGHS] he was about to be sentenced. That was back in 2013 in Barron County, Wisconsin.

He'd been accused of stealing a push lawnmower and some tools.

JULIA ANGWIN:  Yes. The prosecutor and his attorney had actually come to a plea deal, which would have had no prison time. And they presented it to the judge. The judge said, you know, I'm looking at the risk score here that shows him at very high risk of being a violent criminal, and so I'm gonna overturn your plea deal and actually give him two years in prison. That is when Paul Zilly learned that he had this score and that it was gonna be such an impact on his life. So from prison, he appealed his score, attempted to get it overturned. Eventually, he got it reduced from two years to a year and a half. But it’s worth pointing out that he wouldn't have served any prison time if the judge had not overruled the plea deal, to begin with, based on these scores.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  In fairness though, these scores sometimes do work as originally intended, to direct defendants to programs that could help them and to keep them out of jail.

JULIA ANGWIN:  Yeah, Virginia and other states use risk scores to justify diverting people from prison to treatment programs, and that's proven really successful at reducing prison populations without increasing crime.

The question I really have is, if this score is only 60 percent correct under the best circumstances and 20 percent correct when you talk about violent crime, is that the right way to choose who gets that one spot in the treatment program? That's my question. [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But how do you do it, because these algorithms were supposed to be designed to bypass our personal biases in making those judgments? How do you do that kind of triage?

JULIA ANGWIN:  Right. I just think that if the judge got the score with a little thing saying, this thing is only 60 percent accurate, and the defendant had a chance to challenge it with independent tests and everyone felt like they’d had a full hearing - what I'm describing is just what we call due process –

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

- I think that I wouldn't have any problem with it being used. But that’s what's happening, right?

What needs to be done is what we did, which is independent assessment which validates it. The problem is that no one's doing that. New York State - they were the first buyer of Northpointe score – they then went and did their own validation study. They didn’t believe their study until 12 years after they had started using the score. And when they did it, they didn’t test race or the violent score. The only independent validations that occur are by the buyers of the score after they've implemented it, because it takes years.

But here’s what I would say:  That’s where you get into this question of accuracy. So imagine if you just said, look, we are a racist system. Policing is racist, prosecution is racist, sentencing is racist. So then you have to start making moral judgments. You know, it's not all math. That’s how I view it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Yeah.

JULIA ANGWIN:  You know, math can only take you so far. Eventually, math is really just a cover story for morality.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Julia, thank you so much.

JULIA ANGWIN:  Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Julia Angwin is a senior reporter at ProPublica.

  [MUSIC/MUSIC UP & UNDER]

DEBORAH AMOS:  That’s it for this week’s show. On the Media is produced by Meara Sharma, Alana Casanova-Burgess, Jesse Brenneman and Dasha Lisitsina. We had more help from Emma Stelter, Isabel Cristo and Micah Loewinger. And our show was edited by Brooke. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Casey Holford.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Katya Rogers is our executive producer. Jim Schachter is WNYC's vice president for news. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Bob Garfield will be back next week. I’m Brooke Gladstone.

DEBORAH AMOS:  And I’m Deb Amos.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So Deb, did you see Game of Thrones last week?

DEBORAH AMOS:  Yes! But you know what? The Brexit vote could mess everything up for the show.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You are such a news junkie. How do you make that connection?

DEBORAH AMOS:  So it’s the EU that funded the production in Northern Ireland. It’s where the last battle scene happens. It took them 25 days to shoot it. That’s paid for by the EU. With Britain out of the European Union, they could lose their funding! And Winterfell could fall.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  [LAUGHS] Not again! Thanks, Deb.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Thanks, Brooke.

 [GAME OF THRONES CLIP]:

RAZDAHL MO ERAZ:  I imagine it's difficult adjusting to the new reality. Your reign is over.

DAENERYS TARGARYEN:  My reign has just begun.

Data Cop Out

Weather, moon phases, locations of schools and churches -- these are all factors considered in predictive policing, a practice of analyzing crime data and uncovering patterns that may give patrol officers a leg up. Nowadays, predictive policing is powered by expensive and privately developed software, which is used by more than 150 police department across the country. While media outlets and police celebrate lower crime rates, critics argue that programs like HunchLab may not be able to claim responsibility -- especially considering very little research exists on their efficacy. Deb speaks with The Marshall Project’s Maurice Chammah, who isn't convinced HunchLab works. He visited Jennings, Missouri, a city neighboring Ferguson, to find out whether this supposedly unbiased software is really helping law enforcement do their jobs. 

Published in

On The Media

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

DEBORAH AMOS:  And I'm Deb Amos. As we just heard from Matt Levitt, there is no sure way to predict a crime but that's precisely what 150 police departments across the country are trying to do with the help of a new algorithm, and it's getting rave reviews.

  [CLIPS]:

MALE CORRESPONDENT:  When it comes to protecting you and your family from violence or crime, law enforcement is gaining an edge.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  It’s called predictive policing.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  Predictive policing. Their officers can use their experience and their intuition with a scientific program to catch criminals in the act.

MALE CORRESPONDENT:  Norcross police busted two burglars inside this house because a computer predicted the crime. That's right. Is the future of crime fighting predicting the crimes of the future?

DEBORAH AMOS:  But when Maurice Chammah, a reporter at The Marshall Project, went to Jennings, Missouri to see one predictive policing tool in action - it's called HunchLab - he found no evidence that it actually works.

MAURICE CHAMMAH:  What this new technology does is take in more data than any individual police officer could ever on their own, not just the crime, the weather. The phases of the moon has even factored into what HunchLab does, the wind speed, the proximity to schools and to sporting events, and it can factor in the schedule for sporting events so that you know that you want to cluster more police around a stadium when there's a sporting event. And the idea is that the algorithm can kind of be smarter than a person can be.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Although it sounds pretty logical that if you have a sports event, you'd send more police around the stadium.

MAURICE CHAMMAH:  Right, and as these predictive policing technologies have come into the fore, a lot of police officers told me that they're essentially telling them what they already knew.

DEBORAH AMOS:  You went out on patrol in Jennings, and so how did you see it work?

MAURICE CHAMMAH:  For decades now, police officers on the ground have patrolled closer to areas that are called hotspots, which are areas where there's been a lot of crime before. And with HunchLab, if you imagine - you know, there's a computer screen in the front of most police cars right now - we’re sitting in the car, the computer screen is in front of the officer and he has the HunchLab software up on it. And it’s basically a map that has these little boxes, and those boxes are saying, during your shift it's more likely that this kind of crime is going to happen here. So the idea with the technology is that over the course of months and years you’re decreasing the number of crimes because police cars are around.

DEBORAH AMOS:  So you can't really know –

MAURICE CHAMMAH:  You can’t.

DEBORAH AMOS:  - if this works for years and years. So police departments are putting money in this technology but there's no data.

MAURICE CHAMMAH:  There is not great data, no. Studies are starting to be done. Some of those studies are funded by the companies that make the technology, which obviously raises suspicion.

DEBORAH AMOS:  And these are private companies.

MAURICE CHAMMAH:  And these are private companies. And police departments, when I confronted them with this, at least in St. Louis, the line that I got was, it’s not that expensive when you consider what policing costs, so they may be paying $80,000, which is the salary for some officers.

DEBORAH AMOS:  What’s composition of the Jennings Police Department?
MAURICE CHAMMAH:  Mostly white and, and Jennings itself is mostly black.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Embracing this technology, is there anywhere,  even among the police that you were with, that it could lead to more racial tension, rather than less in these communities?

MAURICE CHAMMAH:  Yeah. I mean, I definitely got the sense that racial tension in Jennings in these communities is high, and this adds to the idea that they're going to very specific spots and targeting people because they're in those spots. And there's every reason for people who are then being targeted to suspect, well hey, you know, why were you following me around? Just because I’m in this box doesn't mean I'm a criminal. Police will come back and say, well, these are the areas where there's the most crime. We just want to prevent the crime. And there are plenty of people who say, well, that is sort of blind to history and inequality. And then the police say, well, it’s really not our job to fox those things. Our job is, in the next 12 hours, to make it that there's less crime in this neighborhood than more.

But lots and lots of civil liberties advocates I spoke to in the St. Louis area were very worried that predictive policing technology would aggravate the extent to which a predominantly white police department would stop and frisk and search the cars of African-American residents. I think police officers would say, well, the data is better than my individual sort of decision making. And that conversation, I think, is another way in which predictive policing is now kind of the centerpiece for this very old debate that will continue.

DEBORAH AMOS:  And there's no way to tell that if they just opened the door and got out of the car and sort of did a walk and talk in the community, that that wouldn’t also reduce crime?

MAURICE CHAMMAH:  Right. No, we don't know. And it might reduce crime more. Crime rates fluctuate a lot, and so saying that a specific technology or a specific program reduced crime or exacerbated it is very, very hard to do.

DEBORAH AMOS:  As you say, this is the technology that's in the middle of the table. But HunchLab is only one of the entrants in this field. The big one is something called PredPol.

MAURICE CHAMMAH:  Very Silicon Valley, isn’t it?

DEBORAH AMOS:  It’s the more expensive model.

MAURICE CHAMMAH:  Yes.

DEBORAH AMOS:  And it comes with some responsibilities, if you take it on. Police departments are asked to essentially advertise for the company, to give press conferences, to tout the successes. That is a whole new relationship between technology and policing.

MAURICE CHAMMAH:  It is, and it is a disconcerting one. A lot of policing [LAUGHS] after Ferguson, and I hope this doesn’t sound too controversial, but a lot of it is about PR, a lot of it is about projecting that, you know, we’re fixing things, we’re doing what we do better. On a very real level, police departments are kind of grappling with that. And PredPol comes in and seems to have some answers for how to police in a way that appears to be better and more objective, and I think police departments are clinging to that.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Why do you think that police departments – and I’ll ask specifically about Jennings - is so willing to embrace a technology when there's no data to tell them that it works and there may not be reliable data for a long time?

MAURICE CHAMMAH:  I think there's a sense that this might work a little bit, and that's enough, that it doesn't have to completely reduce the amount of crime in a drastic way for the amount that we’re shelling out to be a little but worth it. We think that it will, just on a day-to-day level, kind of bump up our crime reductions. These police departments are kind of casting about for solutions, especially in this era that they sort of facing such scrutiny and pressure.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Thanks very much.

MAURICE CHAMMAH:  Thank you.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Maurice Chammah is a writer at The Marshall Project. 

Stopping Mass Shooters Long Before They Act

Published in

On The Media

DEBORAH AMOS:  So if communities can help curb the most common kind of gun violence, perhaps they can do the same for the rarest kind, mass shootings. The FBI hopes so because the Bureau is hamstrung when it comes to people like Orlando shooter Omar Mateen. The FBI investigated him twice, and he just didn’t fit the profile of a terrorist. Director James Comey, speaking a day after the Orlando massacre.

  [CLIP]:

FBI DIRECTOR JAMES COMEY:  We’re also going to look hard at our own work to see whether there is something we should have done differently. So far, the honest answer is I don’t think so.

  [END CLIP]

DEBORAH AMOS:  When someone doesn't check all the FBI's terrorist boxes but still exhibits really troubling behavior, what’s next? Right now, there's a dead end. People are worried about this, people like Matthew Levitt who has worked on counterterrorism at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the State Department and at the FBI.

MATTHEW LEVITT:  What the FBI found was an individual who had  experienced workplace discrimination and decided to push back by claiming affiliation with terrorist groups. They found out that, actually, he didn't belong to a terrorist group. This was someone who was talking bravado. There was not only no law that had been violated, but there wasn't enough to justify continuing this as an intelligence case, so they appropriately closed the case.

DEBORAH AMOS:  This was a young man who frightened people at his work. A man who knew him well, Mohammed Malik, reported to the FBI that he was watching Awlaki videos, and Awlaki is the  American radical who was killed in Yemen but is still popular among young people who are looking out to see if ISIS is for them. If you're watching Awklaki videos, then that’s a step.

MATTHEW LEVITT:  Depending on the context. I’m a counterterrorism researcher. I watch Awlaki videos. That, in and of itself, is not necessarily the trigger. Sometimes the FBI will say, we’ve checked the boxes and there’s not enough to continue an investigation, and that's appropriate, so long as you're then handing things off to somebody else to continue looking at this individual from a social cohesion perspective, a mental health perspective. It can't be FBI or nothing.

That’s why the FBI is pushing an effort right now to create what they're calling SRCs, shared responsibility committees, local community actors, local police, run by mental health experts, social workers, teachers, maybe have participation from other federal government agencies, like the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, to be able to pick up the ball based on these ongoing disturbing but protected behaviors.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Can you talk about models where law enforcement and community organizations are starting to work together, and how do they work?

MATTHEW LEVITT:  There are three pilot projects right now in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Boston. Each is somewhat different, but one of the commonalities is trying to develop programs to identify people, hand them off to the appropriate competent authorities, experts – doctors or what have you - and off ramp them away from the ideology or the mental health issue.

DEBORAH AMOS:  How would that have worked in Mateen’s case?

MATTHEW LEVITT:  Well, theoretically, when a member of his community informed law enforcement of their concerns about him, when the local police shared their concerns about him at the time that they moved him from being a security guard at the courthouse, perhaps when he was dismissed from the correctional authority school, imagine if mental health or other experts had intervened and had helped him walk through the history of being taunted as someone who is overweight, taunted by being one of the few Afghan or Muslim people in his community, possibly sexual identity questions, imagine if those things had been dealt with, would he still have snapped?

DEBORAH AMOS:  It, it does raise though some interesting questions. One is privacy. We've already seen in two cases, psychiatrists, in the case in Colorado, and also in the German pilot who flew a plane into the side of a mountain, in both cases their psychiatrists knew that these were dangerous people, but because of privacy laws they couldn't report it. This also applies to social workers. How do you ensure privacy, at the same time ensuring that people who are dangerous are appropriately reported?

MATTHEW LEVITT:  It’s a very important question that is beyond my competency. What I can tell you is that there are people who are already thinking this through, and psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and there are situations in which you are able and, in some cases, even are required to report behavior to authorities. That's only one area that has to be worked out, and there are others. Among the more complicated are insurance questions. Let’s say you're one of these community organizations and you work with someone and you help them address the issues that were causing them angst and everything is fine for say five years, and then something happens in the international environment or in their personal environment that causes new powerful grievances, and they get either re-radicalized or radicalized on something new and, God forbid, hurt somebody? Can the family members of the new victim sue the people who worked on de-radicalizing this individual several years earlier?

DEBORAH AMOS:  Can we also talk about, you know, the dangers of thought police. I mean, it’s one thing to see a war in the Middle East on television and jump up and be angry, and it's another thing to take action. You don't want to turn community groups or even the FBI into thought police, so how do you know where that line is?

MATTHEW LEVITT:  The whole purpose of this is to prevent the FBI from becoming thought police, and it’s the reason the FBI is pushing this. They don’t want to be in this space. To the extent people think that they're being thought police, it’s going to be very hard for them to work in these communities. One of the whole purposes here is to bridge that gap. But we have to do everything within our power to put in place systems and procedures to catch as many of these instances as possible. And  we can do better.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Matt, thanks very much.

MATTHEW LEVITT:  Thanks for having me.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Matthew Levitt is director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

  [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Comin’ up, humans are biased and they rush to judgment. That’s why we have data. Too bad that doesn’t work either.

DEBORAH AMOS:  This is On the Media.

Expanding the Gun Violence Conversation

On The Media

Published in

On The Media

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  This is On the Media. I’m Brooke Gladstone.

DEBORAH AMOS:  And I'm Deb Amos. A few minutes ago Rachael Larimore urged that gun issues be covered by gun beat reporters. And we found one. Lois Beckett covers guns for the Guardian US. This week, she published a series of pieces exploring the warped politics of gun control. Now, Beckett says it’s not just that reporters tend to botch the technical details, it’s that the entire debate is steered by outrage that follows mass shootings.

LOIS BECKETT:  Mass shootings, if you look at the number of victims, they are something like 1 percent of overall gun murder victims. And if you let the circumstances of 1 percent of anything drive what you're trying to do to fix the other 99 percent, you’re going to fail.

DEBORAH AMOS:  You often hear some of the same solutions, for   example, Australia. There, after a mass shooting in 1996, there was a ban, there was a mandatory buyback of more than, what, 600,000 guns.

LOIS BECKETT:  Up to a million in a couple of buybacks.

DEBORAH AMOS:  And they melted them down. Even President Obama  has, has cited Australia as, you know, this is the solution. You say no. Why?

LOIS BECKETT:  You have to look at the big picture of Australia. Before the Port Arthur massacre, Australia had something like 67 gun murders a year. There was a dramatic drop after Australia melted down those million weapons. So it went from 67 to somewhere around 30. Thirty lives saved is very important but the scale of it is so vastly different from the United States. The scale of gun ownership there is so vastly different. The cost of melting down 1 million guns is a lot, something as high as $500 million. But in America, to do the equivalent reduction in the gun supply, we would have to confiscate 90 million guns. So you’re in billions of dollars. And also, you’re confiscating guns in a country with a Second Amendment, and people tell me that would just cause a civil war.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Can you give me some examples of the ineffective solutions that we've sought that are fueled by this horror over mass shootings?

LOIS BECKETT:  The assault weapon ban is a great example. These are weapons that are culturally repulsive to Democrats, to liberals, to non-gun owners. They look scary, they seem outrageous. In talking to gun control leaders from the early ‘90s and the late ‘80s, they said, you know, we knew from the beginning that if we eliminated them it wouldn’t make a huge difference, but people had this instinctive reaction to them. It was a popular in a way that some of the very technical, more effective gun violence prevention policies were not. And so, for more than 20 years, Democrats have fought for this policy that everyone feels passionately about and that everyone knows won’t make much of a difference.

We have tremendous coverage of school shootings in America and so we have spent, as a country, almost $1 billion since the Columbine school shootings to put police officers in schools. There is no evidence that putting police officers in schools is gonna do much good on that because these incidents are so rare. So we’re spending a tremendous amount of money because our emotions are focused on public schools’ need to be safe. And, at the same time, schools are sometimes cutting mental health counseling, they’re cutting intervention programs, and this misguided impulse might be actually making their students less safe.

DEBORAH AMOS:  So what should we be talking about?

LOIS BECKETT:  A few basic things. One, if you talk about gun violence in America, you have to talk about race and racism, because 15 of the 30 Americans murdered each day with guns are gonna be black men, and they’re something like 7 percent of the overall population. And most of America is actually quite safe. Even most of Chicago is quite safe. But there are very concentrated neighborhoods where the rates of gun homicide are equivalent to failed states. So to think of America as just a uniform place with a uniform gun problem is wrong. You have to say, this is a very concentrated problem among people who are extremely at risk in a lot of different ways. And we have to grapple with the complexity of that.

And one of the effects of having a lot of police officers in schools after Columbine may have been to fuel that school-to-prison pipeline, where students of color are taken from a normal school disciplinary process to the criminal justice system. So it’s a terrifying idea that we wanted to stop lone wolf young white man from shooting in schools and instead we put our young men of color in danger.

DEBORAH AMOS:  The parents from Sandy Hook have come together as a lobbying group. They've really learned about gun control and they've made some interesting acknowledgments about what works and what doesn't. Can you talk about where they see the priority is?

LOIS BECKETT:  So I was talking a lot to Nicole Hockley who lost her son Dylan. And you have to remember, like these are parents whose first-graders were killed with these horrific military- style weapons but when they took the time to look at why Americans were dying, you know, this was just not at the center of it. So they are focusing more now on universal background checks, on mental health, on intervention programs, on domestic violence gun laws. It was just amazing to talk to Nicole Hockley and to hear how hard it was for her to say, if we limited the size of ammunition magazines, maybe the shooter would have had to reload more often and maybe my kid would have gotten to run out of the room like some other kids, when he had to pause to reload. And yet, she doesn't think it's most important thing to fight for.

DEBORAH AMOS:  And what does she think the most important thing to fight for is?

LOIS BECKETT:  She and other parents put their lobbying efforts towards fighting for universal background checks because that's what they were told would do the most good.

DEBORAH AMOS:  We have seen extraordinary scenes from Congress this week. Democrats were literally sitting on the floor of the House, forcing, trying to force a vote on gun legislation. Are they fighting for legislation that could save lives? Is it worth the stunt?

LOIS BECKETT:  So when we think about the sort of no-fly, no-buy list, that basically means if you have people who are suspected of terrorism, we should be able to bar them from buying guns, and maybe even if they are no longer on a watch list but had been in previous years, that the FBI would be flagged if someone like Omar Mateen went out and bought a bunch of guns. This is something that, in some ways, make sense and could be valuable. There are real civil liberties concerns about this. These  various watch lists are not transparent, and so you have the ACLU and many Democrats actually totally outraged that Democrats were doing this.

Would it help to somehow address suspected terrorists and maybe make it a bit harder for them to buy guns, in some way? Sure. Will that have any impact on overall gun violence? No. Universal background checks are more complicated. That’s something that a lot of people think would do good. We don’t actually have good data to know how much. A lot of people are making a big bet that it will help, but it's really important that it was universal background checks and not an assault weapon ban that is at the center of this fight, because at least universal background checks could potentially make a difference to overall violence. So that’s a step forward.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Are we looking in the wrong place? Is it gun control legislation that reduces gun violence in America or is it something else? Is it mental health prevention? Is it community policing?

LOIS BECKETT:  That was what was so amazing to me in covering this, is that even as the national conversation was saying that there's a stalemate and they’re just making no progress, there are cities in America that have made dramatic progress by focusing on the small number of young man driving the shootings in very dangerous neighborhoods and intervening with them in ways that offer social services, also offer threats of law enforcement crackdowns.

It turns out, actually, that focusing on the people driving the violence can be tremendously effective. In Oakland, in New Orleans, you see substantial drops in overall homicide. So you have this incredible local movement that’s seeing some progress, and it’s only just beginning to translate into the national debate.

DEBORAH AMOS:  This amazing moment in the House - political theater, a publicity stunt, whatever you want to call it - are we actually at some turning point where there is momentum to look at this issue and find something that actually reduces the numbers?

LOIS BECKETT:  This debate has totally transformed because Democrats think this is an issue they can use to win. I mean, that's what gun control advocates and the more thoughtful politicians try to do after every mass shooting. They take that outrage and they take the immediate focus on things like the assault weapon ban, things that are emotional and triggering and probably not that helpful for the bigger picture and try to say, okay, can we pivot from the assault weapon ban to background checks? Can we take this rage and try to channel it to things that actually might work better?

And that's been really hard to do because in order to do that you have to understand that bigger picture. But usually the cycle happens so quickly that there's not even time enough for people to be informed before it drops off the radar and it stops being covered, and then we’re back again at the very beginning, having learned nothing.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Those parents from Sandy Hook, did they see that this is a moment? It wasn't when their children were killed.

LOIS BECKETT:  I remember talking to Nicole Hockley, I think, two days after Orlando, and she was so angry that this had happened again. And then one or two days later, Chris Murphy is on the floor of the Senate with the picture of Dylan wearing a Superman t-shirt.

  [CLIP]:

SEN. CHRIS MURPHY:  He loved to cuddle, he loved to play tag  every single morning at the bus stop with the neighbors. He was so proud that he was learning how to read. And he’d bring a new book every day home.

  [END CLIP]

 [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

LOIS BECKETT:  And Nicole watched it afterwards and cried and felt encouraged and believes that, that she’s on the right side of history, that we’re gonna fix this somehow.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Thanks so much. Lois Beckett is a senior reporter covering gun policy and politics for Guardian US.

What the Media Don't Get About Gun Owners

Published in

On The Media

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Many journalists would probably concede that they make mistakes when covering guns. If you don't own one, never fired one, the technical distinctions may seem trivial but, as we heard, this ignorance often comes across as distain, further evidence of a liberal press that would rather be rid of gun culture altogether than learn anything about it. Often, that feeling is mutual.

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  I’m getting the impression not only are they not learning enough, they don't want to learn enough.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Kevin Michalowski is a police officer, gun safety instructor and executive editor of Concealed Carry Magazine.

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  I have gone out of my way, both as a police officer and as a member of what we will call the firearms media right now. I have offered my services free of charge, to provide some of the detail that members of the media really need to put together accurate stories. And I get absolutely no response. Most of the reporters in the world have no experience with firearms, are afraid of firearms and don't want to know anything about firearms. It’s basically “gun go bang, gun bad.” That’s all anybody wants to know.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So the media are pathetically uninformed about guns. Are they pathetically uninformed about gun owners?

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  The media, by and large, looks at gun owners as hillbilly cowboys who are just wandering around waiting for a fight. Typically, what we get, more from the people who are watching the media and commenting, is that the only reason I own a gun is because I have a small penis; I’m compensating for something else.

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

And this idea that we own guns because we want to fight, to make us feel stronger or we need to control something or we have this problem with authority, or, or whatever it is, that’s completely off base for people that I deal with day-in and day-out. Our gun owners are, on average, about 55 years old. They’re highly educated men, typically. They’re affluent and they get lots and lots of training.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Are you deriving that from statistics or is it just that you've met so many of them?

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  I take that from how many gun owners there are in the country. We’re looking at somewhere upwards of 100 million people. A third of America owns firearms. All these 100  million people who are doing everything right, that’s not news. What’s making news is the one idiot who goes out there and does something stupid, and then the media says, well look, a guy with a gun did this. You’re not looking at the 100 million people standing behind this guy saying, man, he was an idiot. He should take personal responsibility for what he did. And gun owners are the people with the most responsibility for what they're doing because we understand what can happen when someone uses a gun improperly.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm. You host a series of YouTube videos called “Into the Fray.” And, in fact, you address not just gun safety but also the use of language and etiquette. There’s one called, “Gun Owners: How NOT to Act on Social Media,” where you  read a violent social media post made by a gun owner who’s  talking about how he wanted to shoot someone who looked at his wife the wrong way. And you said –

 [CLIP]:

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  I tell this to people all the time. No  matter what you've been through, no matter what you’ve seen, no matter what has happened to you in the past, none of that stuff gives you the right to act crazy. We are responsibly armed Americans, and that means we take very seriously our right to keep and bear arms. This is not how we should act.

  [END CLIP]

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  First of all, I was – I was very upset by the language that this guy chose to use.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  He said, “I should have shot him,” right?

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  Yeah, he said, “I should have shot him.” And, you know what, there are cases where people need to be shot, but not for how they look at you or how they talk to you or anything like that. We only use force of any kind against behavior.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Life-threatening behavior.

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  Yes. But one of the key elements for me making that video and reminding people about this was what's going to happen to you after you're involved in a deadly force incident, in which you used force to defend yourself against an imminent deadly threat? Once the district attorney gets ahold of your social media posts, suddenly you are no longer an unwilling participant who was forced into a situation to defend yourself, but now everybody starts talking about how violent and angry you were before - you are just looking for a fight.

We want to make sure that we are showing the world we’re doing the right thing because that's the kind of people we are. We’re  safe on the range, we’re safe in public. And there's no such thing as an accidental discharge. It is an negligent discharge. If your gun, quote, unquote, “goes off” you did something to make it go off. That’s just the truth.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You think about language a lot. For instance, you never use the phrase “shoot to kill.” You have a different phrase.

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  We want to stop the threat. I don't want to kill anybody. The firearm is your last resort - situational awareness, conflict avoidance and then objectively reasonable force to stop the threat. We’re in the middle of a training video shoot right now, teaching people not to use deadly force in protection of property. If somebody’s burglarizing your car, let ‘em take whatever they got from your car and go away. Don't start shooting at them. And that's what the vast majority of gun owners know and the vast majority of media people think we don't know.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You wrote a piece for the website Personal Liberty a few months ago, titled “Let's Not Lose Our Humanity.” I'll quote a little from that. “Maybe it is time we, as gun owners, step up and show our humanity. Perhaps your local gun club, which is very likely in the suburbs or some rural area, could make a substantial donation to an urban food pantry or a homeless shelter or, better yet, show up and serve food or help with distribution, put on your range safety officer best and pick up trash where everyone can see you. What if every gun show in America were a collection point for food for the local food pantry? What do you think of me now, Michael Bloomberg?”

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  Yeah, we’re losing the media war because the media won't listen to us. Gun owners in America, they’re  members of the Lions Club, they’re involved in their community, they’re on school boards. We’re losing the public relations campaign because we don't have a voice in the media. If I took a group of range safety officers and we did a trash cleanup day, the media wouldn’t show up. But let one bullet escape the range, go over the berm and hit someone’s house, the media’s gonna be all over that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Do you think there is any way to bridge the divide, to address the issue of gun violence in our country, to concede that there may be a problem and that guns might be involved, or do you think that this is just an unbreachable gap?

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  I’m gonna have to say, just based on the words you gave me now, this may be an unbreachable gap.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Uh huh.

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  You’re already assuming that the problem is the piece of gear, the inanimate object.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Do we agree that there are too many homicides in this country, most of which are committed with guns? Do you  feel that those two things can't have any relation to each other?

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  Yes, I will agree that there are too many homicides in this country, but I don't believe it is the result of firearms. I believe that any criminal activity is an individual's choice.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And you believe that guns don't figure in to the number of crimes, when it makes committing a criminal act easier?

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  No, I don't believe that guns figure into that. Coming to take away my firearms or to restrict my access to firearms or ammunition or whatever you’re going to do is not going to do anything to reduce the crime.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  I’m willing to concede that I am reflexive on that point, but I have to come back at you and say, full  background checks across the country, not just in some states, you know, license like we have to do with a car is not restricting anybody's access to guns. Everybody you know would qualify for a gun with no problem at all!

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  You’re right. I will concede that I have a reflex. What I can do for the sake of advancing this conversation, I will say, okay, yes, let’s do exactly what you say. Let's make sure that we have a background check for the transfer of any firearm from one person to another and let’s  make sure that every person has to have their gun listed, so that some civil authority knows where that gun is. It is not going to reduce crime. The people who are on the bad side of the equation, they’re breaking the law anyway, so they’re just gonna break another law.

I'm looking at numbers from the FBI records here, of 12,000 total firearms deaths, out of a nation of 300 million people. Yes, 12,000 deaths is too many because death is a tragic thing. But we have 100 million firearms owners. Now, let’s start plotting where all of these crimes are on a map and go to those areas and solve the problems that are leading to the crimes in those areas.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Kevin, I would love to go around this circle with you a million times more, but I have to say goodbye.

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  Okay. I will take you shooting, I will put guns in your hand.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You will?

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  Yes, absolutely. We can train you and show you, and we’ll make that happen.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Kevin, thank you very much.

KEVIN MICHALOWSKI:  Oh, you're very welcome, and thank you for having me on the show.

  [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Kevin Michalowski is a police officer, gun safety instructor and executive editor of Concealed Carry Magazine.

DEBORAH AMOS:  Coming up, a possible way out of gun control gridlock, information and distance from Washington, DC.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  This is On the Media.