SHANKAR VEDANTAM, HOST:
Hey there. Shankar here. The HIDDEN BRAIN team has been transfixed by the nationwide protests in recent weeks. The enormous number of demonstrators may be new, but the biases they're protesting are not. In 2017, we produced an episode on a little-known form of racial bias. We decided to return to that episode now, as many people are pushing for reforms in the criminal justice system. Please note that the episode includes the sounds of shootings from a college campus, as well as music with violent and explicit language. Here's the episode.
On a chilly April morning in 2007, a nightmare unfolded on a college campus in Virginia. A 23-year-old student acting alone opened fire in a dormitory. He shot and killed two students. Then he walked across campus and began killing people in an engineering building. The sound of gunfire was caught on a student's cellphone.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)
TINA HARRISON: We weren't sure what it was. It was gunshots. But for a while, we thought it might have been construction. We heard this horrible scream and laughter.
VEDANTAM: Tina Harrison was a student in the building.
HARRISON: So we're sitting in the classroom, and basically panic broke out. All we could hear was people screaming, laughter and more screaming. And I counted 24 gunshots within a minute, and I lost track after that. I just started praying.
VEDANTAM: By the time the assault ended, 32 people were dead. The gunman took his own life. The shooting at Virginia Tech was quickly seared into our minds as one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. Unfortunately, it's been followed by many other school shootings, including the killing of 17 students at Parkland, Fla. In all these cases, the news media has struggled to convey the sheer scale of the massacre.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS MONTAGE)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: There was terror and then sorrow today at the campus of Virginia Tech.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: An act of evil on a scale that we've never seen in this country before.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: Twenty-four hours after the news began to break, Blacksburg, Va., is still in shock from its wounds. And so is much of...
VEDANTAM: But even as the country mourned, people began to ask why campus officials hadn't been more proactive. Why hadn't they spotted the warning signs? Why hadn't they locked down the school after the first shooting in the dorm? At a press conference, campus police tried to explain.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: We had information from witnesses and the evidence at the scene that led us to believe the shooter was no longer in the building and more than likely off campus.
VEDANTAM: Reporters grilled officials, who, at times, seemed lost for words.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: Chief, can you outline your lockdown policy for the university?
WENDELL FLINCHUM: Are you saying that, do we have a policy to lock down the campus?
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: Yeah, like when and under what circumstances do you do it? What's your time frame on the...
FLINCHUM: I don't - it's not in my communications plan.
VEDANTAM: Eventually, the state of Virginia and the university paid victims' families more than $11 million to settle lawsuits. Across the nation, universities scrambled to improve their security protocols. Many added expensive upgrades to emergency alert systems and hired new police officers to stay on top of possible danger.
A wariness took hold on college campuses. A subtle fear was in the air, a low-grade buzz of anxiety. People weren't taking chances. At schools like Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, small things that were out of place led to intense scrutiny.
TOM GIBBONS: His car was discovered parked in a very conspicuous, a very unusual, no-parking area at the university here in Edwardsville. And they found, you know, visible in the car, a note.
VEDANTAM: This week on HIDDEN BRAIN, we explore a complicated case that unfolded in the months after the Virginia Tech shooting. It was so complicated that even today, years later, people still disagree about what really happened. At the heart of the case was this question - how can we know, really know, what's happening inside another person's head? Perception, reality and judgment, this week on HIDDEN BRAIN.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: Three months after the Virginia Tech massacre, an Illinois gun dealer picked up the phone and called the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He told an agent that he was worried about a client who was trying to purchase guns.
GIBBONS: It was the first time he'd ever made a report to the ATF, in, I think, about 10 years of being a gun seller, a gun dealer.
VEDANTAM: Tom Gibbons is the Madison County, Ill., state's attorney. Tom says the man who'd contacted the gun dealer was agitated and adamant. He said he needed the guns quickly.
GIBBONS: And what he was purchasing was unusual. He was buying three low-cost, exact same models of a gun - a semiautomatic handgun, .380 caliber.
VEDANTAM: The gun dealer explained that the man, whose name was Olutosin Oduwole, had purchased the guns wholesale on the Internet and needed him, a licensed transfer agent, to complete the transaction. Olutosin's background check was clean, but the gun dealer felt something wasn't right.
The ATF suspected Olutosin might possibly be a straw purchaser, someone buying guns for someone else. But Tom Gibbons says police also considered more sinister motives.
GIBBONS: Having three identical weapons - if a person's going to do something harmful or commit a mass casualty event, having three identical firearms has the advantage of being able to use the identical ammunition, to use the exact same magazines with that ammunition no matter which of the guns you're using. And of course, buying low-cost, multiple weapons allows you to have multiple weapons available at a single time.
VEDANTAM: The ATF quickly learned that Olutosin was a student at Southern Illinois University.
GIBBONS: The ATF contacted the local police department, and they began to look into it.
VEDANTAM: According to documents later filed in court, the ATF agent also called campus police detective Rick Weissenborn. The ATF gave the detective a heads-up that Olutosin had ordered weapons over the Internet. Rick Weissenborn wrote a memo to his colleagues that advised them to use caution if they encountered the young man.
Two days later, a police officer on a routine campus patrol came across an unattended car. He alerted Rick Weissenborn, who went to investigate. Police traced the license plate to Olutosin Oduwole.
GIBBONS: His car was discovered parked in a very conspicuous, a very unusual no-parking area at the university here in Edwardsville.
VEDANTAM: Police monitored the vehicle to see if anyone approached it. For two days, Rick Weissenborn drove past the car himself. No one showed up. The detective notified his supervisor. Campus police were authorized to tow a vehicle that had been left unattended for more than 24 hours.
GIBBONS: So when his car was being towed, it's police department policy that the car is inventoried. They take an inventory of the contents, and they found, you know, visible in the car, a note.
VEDANTAM: It was protruding from underneath the center console. It had writing on both sides. On one side were what seemed like rap lyrics. Turn the page over, and there were more lyrics. Tom says they read like this.
GIBBONS: And I - you may have to bleep some of this out. I lead, she, a follower. I'm single and not with her, but she got a throat deeper than a sword swallower.
VEDANTAM: Further down on the page was more writing. Tom says these were not lyrics.
GIBBONS: Send $2 to - and then it's a PayPal account. If the money doesn't reach $50,000 in the next seven days, then a murderous rampage similar to the Virginia Tech shooting will occur at another highly populated university - and then, in all capital letters, this is not a joke.
VEDANTAM: Police didn't take it as one. Detective Rick Weissenborn took photos of the vehicle. While snapping pictures of the back seat, he noticed release straps and pulled them to lower the seatbacks. He found a wad of clothing. There was a long-sleeved shirt, a short-sleeved shirt and a knit cap with a ski mask. The detective seized all of it. Officers also found six rounds of .25 caliber ammunition in the car. They felt they needed to act fast.
THOMAS PHILLIPS III: It was pretty early in the morning, I remember. And I had just gotten up and gotten out of the shower.
VEDANTAM: This is Thomas Phillips III. He was Olutosin Oduwole's roommate that summer. He remembers a loud pounding on the door.
PHILLIPS: And there was about eight police officers standing there.
VEDANTAM: Thomas was asked to step out of the room. Police told Olutosin he was under arrest. Olutosin was wearing basketball shorts and a tank top. He didn't have shoes on.
PHILLIPS: They cuffed him. They had his hands behind his back, and he didn't look my way when he came out. But I don't also think that he saw where I was sitting because I was sitting off to the side on the stairs. But they took him out the long way, toward the back, where they had a car waiting for him.
VEDANTAM: A search of the dorm room uncovered a camcorder, videocassettes and a Dell laptop computer. Tom Gibbons says there was also something else - a Jennings .25 caliber pistol.
GIBBONS: A loaded firearm.
VEDANTAM: The gun belonged to Olutosin. So let's review. A young man attempts to purchase multiple guns over the Internet. He's described as agitated and anxious by a gun dealer involved in the transaction. The ATF launches an investigation. The young man's car is found, apparently abandoned, on a campus side road. Inside it is a piece of paper with a threat on it, alluding to ransom and a possible massacre on a university campus. When the young man is arrested, a loaded gun is discovered in his dorm room. State's Attorney Tom Gibbons says police felt they had prevented a serious crime.
GIBBONS: So connecting the dots, it became apparent that, in fact, he was planning. He was, if not planning an actual mass casualty event, he was planning to be able to credibly threaten that. And he was taking steps, actual steps, towards making a terrorist threat.
VEDANTAM: It wasn't long before the news media got ahold of the story. Coming just after the Virginia Tech shooting, the story generated wall-to-wall coverage. Thomas Phillips.
PHILLIPS: For I'd say about a week solid, news coverage had his face on CNN, MSNBC, like, you know, pretty much any news station you could turn to that had headline news. And he was either the first or second subject of it.
That's all we saw on the news of him was pretty much, he's a terrorist. He planned this entire attack. He left a threatening note in his car. There was ammunition. He was purchasing guns to either fund this attack or carry the attack out. They showed a table of guns that he never got but that he wanted to actually buy at some point.
VEDANTAM: It turned out Olutosin had actually ordered four guns off the Internet, three of them low-caliber guns identical to one another. And the other was a .45 caliber MAC-10 semiautomatic. State's Attorney Tom Gibbons.
GIBBONS: That is a high - high capacity, certainly a high caliber. And it's a scary - certainly a scary looking gun.
VEDANTAM: As reporters pressed for answers, the investigation grew. Friends were contacted, evidence collected. Then police discovered something important.
GIBBONS: During the investigation, there were computers seized. And something that was located on his girlfriend's computer was a file that he had created in a program called Movie Maker. And what he had made was a video with this language that was found in the note.
VEDANTAM: It was language that read, do you remember the chaos at Virginia Tech? Well, guess what? It's going to happen again in June 2007, unless the viewers of this collectively deposit a total of $200,000 in the following Paypal account - or else the number of students killed in Virginia Tech will be topped during the summer school semester at a target university. This is not a joke.
Tom Gibbons told me that the language was found in a file that had been deleted.
If the video was deleted, how did you know what was in it?
GIBBONS: Well, because nothing is ever really completely deleted off a computer. Our forensic examiners were able to go in, take an image of the hard drive after securing it and extract and do an analysis of all the data that remains on a hard drive.
VEDANTAM: On July 24, 2007, Olutosin Oduwole was formerly charged with storing a weapon in campus housing, and a far more serious crime, attempting to make a terrorist threat.
GIBBONS: The case that was made was effectively that he had constructed this threat. He was planning to use this threat, either to act upon it - it was either that or he was trying to extort money.
VEDANTAM: It was a strange charge - an attempt to make a threat. But since prosecutors couldn't prove the threat had actually been communicated to anyone, that was the best they could do.
GIBBONS: I would say that there was only one step missing that we couldn't prove, and that was the actual public posting of the threat. That was the only last piece of evidence that we didn't have that would have made it a completed terrorist threat.
VEDANTAM: But Tom felt they had plenty of proof showing planning, preparation, an effort to purchase firearms.
GIBBONS: It's like a conspiracy type of case. It's not exactly conspiracy but in the same vein. A person is taking actual, substantial steps toward the commission of the offense. And by doing that, they are, in effect, attempting to commit it.
VEDANTAM: I asked Tom if this was like someone who does some research on how to hire a hitman but doesn't act on it.
GIBBONS: Well, I would liken it more to the person who takes the gun, drives to the intended victim's house and for whatever reason doesn't get out of the car. But they've taken an actual, substantial step toward the act, toward the murder. It's more than just thinking about it. It's more than just a little bit of research. There was a substantial amount of work that went into this.
VEDANTAM: So I like the analogy that you have just now. And I'm curious sort of from a legal perspective what you do with that because let's say someone does buy a gun and does drive to someone's house and doesn't get out of their car and drives off. And let's say the authorities have some way of knowing about all of this happening. Can you charge that person with a crime?
GIBBONS: In the murder context, no. In the threatening context, you can because they're taking actual steps. They're creating things. They're creating the threat.
VEDANTAM: In Tom Gibbons' mind, a catastrophe had been averted. But had it? To find out, I went to meet the man who police described as a dangerous, would-be terrorist. Stay with us.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: Today, the story of a young man accused of an attempted terrorist attack. That young man is Olutosin Oduwole. It's a Nigerian name, but it was given to a boy who was born and raised in St. Louis, Mo.
OLUTOSIN ODUWOLE: You know, as a kid, me and my brothers and our friends in the neighborhood, we used to play in our backyard. We used to go out into the woods and play hide-and-seek and cops and robbers and all that good stuff. And we used to ride our bikes all throughout the neighborhood.
VEDANTAM: Olutosin's parents left Nigeria and emigrated to the United States when they were young. Tosin (ph), as he was called, was raised with his five brothers in a six-bedroom house in St. Louis. He was surrounded by music, lots and lots of music.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NUTHIN' BUT A G THANG")
SNOOP DOGG: (Rapping) One, two, three and to the four, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre is at the door, ready to make an entrance...
ODUWOLE: I fell in love with music probably around 7 or 8 years old. You know, I grew up listening to a lot of Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, a lot of West Coast music, a little bit of, like, Biggie and Nas, but majority West Coast music.
VEDANTAM: What Tosin is talking about here is '90s-style gangster rap straight out of LA. Young men, like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, were writing their talent into stardom.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NUTHIN' BUT A G THANG")
SNOOP DOGG: (Rapping) Perfection is perfected, so I'm a let them understand from a young G's perspective. And before me dig out a b****, I have to find a contraceptive. You never know, she could be earning...
VEDANTAM: Gangsta rap evolved from hip-hop. It's long been controversial because it emphasizes the gangster lifestyle and, at times, promotes violence, misogyny, drugs and murder. But it's popular and commercially very lucrative. For a kid like Tosin, it was magnetic. He was all in.
ODUWOLE: In eighth grade, specifically it was in eighth grade, me and a lot of my friends, we used to start, like, rapping at the lunch table. We'd freestyle, and somebody would do the beat on the table. And we would just go in a circle just freestyling, you know? And it'd be, like, seven or eight of us. And we would do this every single day, literally every single day. And it was just a lot of, you know, profanity, a lot of just, OK, we can finally say what we want to say and...
VEDANTAM: Give me an example.
ODUWOLE: OK, so UGK has a song called "Take It Off," which was really, really big around, like - from, like, '95 to '98. And so that was a really, really big song.
VEDANTAM: How does it go?
ODUWOLE: It was - (laughter) you're putting me on the spot. It was (rapping) take it off, chick, bend over. Let me see it. If you're looking for a trill-type n****, let me be it. Got that V-12 Benz parked outside. It ain't enough room to put them goods in my ride. (Speaking) Something like that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TAKE IT OFF")
UGK: (Rapping) Uh, you got to take it off, take it off, and let a first-class n**** break you off. Chick, you got to take it off, take it off, and let a first-class...
VEDANTAM: You learned this when you were 12?
ODUWOLE: Oh, yeah, definitely (laughter).
VEDANTAM: And so this has stayed with you for a long time (laughter).
ODUWOLE: Oh, of course, that's one of my most favorite - favorite groups of when I was a kid.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TAKE IT OFF")
UGK: (Rapping) Now what I'm supposed to do? Been got close to you looking like a poster, too...
VEDANTAM: Tosin says the swearing and tough talk - that wasn't really the point. The music itself was what moved him.
ODUWOLE: Like, the rhythm, the bass, the drums, the hi-hats, it was kind of like - it was just like a feel. You know, like the - I think what really makes people gravitate towards music is how it makes them feel. And so hip-hop itself, I mean, even if you're not necessarily from the culture, you know, hip-hop makes you feel a certain way. It makes you feel strong, braggadocios, free. It makes you feel creative.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TAKE IT OFF")
UGK: (Rapping) You got to take it off, take it off. And let a first-class n**** break you off...
VEDANTAM: Tosin had a dream that maybe someday he could make a name for himself as a rap star. But when he was 14, his father sent him abroad for school, first to England and then to Nigeria. Now, that might not seem the best move for an aspiring rap artist. But Tosin says his Nigerian boarding school was full of kids like him.
ODUWOLE: So I was surrounded - around a lot of people from New Jersey, New York, Atlanta, California and London. And a lot of them made music. And so a lot of what we used to do in Nigeria when we were in the dorms is that we would write rap music. And I think it was in Nigeria where I really got I guess, like, creative and better and - because we were able to just really lock in.
You know, in America I was only with my friends at school seven hours of the day. In Nigeria, I'm with them 24 hours a day for three months (laughter), you know? And so it was - yeah, it was - it was where, I guess, I fell in love with it more, was when I was in Africa.
VEDANTAM: It was in Nigeria that Tosin made his public debut as a rapper, in church. He went to a Christian school, and each Sunday the entire school went to church. It was a huge church.
ODUWOLE: Sometimes they would allow students from the church to either sing songs on stage or do performances. We decided to do a rap.
VEDANTAM: A Christian rap in front of the entire congregation - 2,500 people. When Tosin to tells the story, you can hear his happiness just remembering that moment.
ODUWOLE: I run on stage with the mic. And everybody's like, ahh (ph). And everybody's, like, praising you. And then I started rapping. Nobody heard what I said, but they were going crazy. And it was like, this is a church. It really fed my ego. I go, man, like, people love me (laughter). The people love me, you know, like, whatever. It's just church. But that was really, really, I guess, a confidence builder as far as, like, OK, you can take your raps away from just your circle of friends and actually, like, say them to the public.
VEDANTAM: When Tosin was in his last year of high school in Nigeria, he applied to go to college in the United States. He had only one school in mind, Southern Illinois University. It appealed to him because it was close to St. Louis, close to his family, his friends, his home. He was accepted. In the fall of 2005, he started his freshman year. Tosin describes it as a pretty typical introduction to college life - classes, parties, students always moving together in huge groups. In the spring, Tosin decided to join a fraternity. He chose and was accepted by Iota Phi Theta, an historically African American frat. Thomas Phillips met Tosin through the fraternity. He remembers his first glimpse of him because Tosin stood out.
PHILLIPS: He was a little bitty kid wearing a gigantic hoodie and the biggest headphones.
VEDANTAM: Vintage headphones.
PHILLIPS: So, you know, like, back in, like, the '80s when they first had, like, the home stereo headphones that were, like, the big, gigantic cushion pairs with the metal braces on the sides, like ones you wouldn't necessarily wear out in public? You might listen to, like, these headphones in the comfort of your own home. But something about those headphones and him being as small as he was then kind of stuck out to me. And so as it turned out, he was really big into music, especially rap music, and that was the best pair of headphones he could find at the time. They gave him the best sound quality, so...
VEDANTAM: So the two became good friends. Thomas says Tosin was big-hearted. He looked out for people. He often asked fraternity brothers to help him check up on the homeless in the area. He organized campus events, including a speech by former Black Panther Bobby Seale. And he drew people together with his music. It was music that made him such a good fit for the fraternity.
PHILLIPS: At the time, most of us in the fraternity at least had some kind of musical talent. Like, if you didn't play an instrument, you sung. If you couldn't sing, you rapped. If you couldn't do any of the three, which I can't, then you were either a producer or a mixer.
VEDANTAM: Tosin, of course, rapped. Thomas produced. They started talking about making it big. As Thomas describes those days to me, he says it's important to understand one thing about Tosin. His music meant everything to him, but it wasn't him.
PHILLIPS: So one of the things that I did notice was that as much as Tosin - his personality - his actual personality came through in his actions, his music was entirely different.
VEDANTAM: Tosin did relish songs with violent and misogynistic lyrics, but that didn't mean that he was a violent or misogynistic person.
PHILLIPS: One of his favorite groups at the time was Three 6 Mafia.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHO RUN IT")
THREE 6 MAFIA: (Rapping) Who run it? Who run it? Who run it? Who run it?
PHILLIPS: I'm not sure if you're familiar with them or not, but a lot of their music at the time was pretty much the version of rock 'n' roll, like, sex and drugs kind of deal.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHO RUN IT")
THREE 6 MAFIA: (Rapping) These b****** ain't running s*** but y'all mouth because the first hater step, the first hater getting tossed out...
VEDANTAM: Eventually, Thomas and Tosin decided to move in together. They found a ratty two-bedroom apartment not far from campus. Thomas says it was perfect.
PHILLIPS: Meaning, like, if you want to rap about, you know, how hard your life is and how, you know, there's a lot of crime in your area and you want to rap about what's real, like, this was the place that you can actually do it. And it feels authentic because you're not actually recording this from, you know, a nice apartment in St. Louis someplace. You're not recording this in a hotel or in a penthouse or in a nice recording studio. We were in the basement. There were roaches everywhere. And we're recording this in a closet.
ODUWOLE: You know - because our studio was in the living room. There was a closet in the living room, which was for coats. Like, you know when you have guests come, you take their coats. You put them in the closet. We turned that closet into a studio booth. So our microphone was in there. We put foam all over the walls to kind of soundproof it, and that was the studio booth.
VEDANTAM: The apartment became a rap salon or, as Tosin puts it, an artist's den.
ODUWOLE: And so that was how it was. It was pieces of paper and notebooks everywhere in the living room, a couch, a TV, a computer, studio equipment, microphone, keyboard. And that was our artist space.
VEDANTAM: They were experimenting, writing, rewriting, trying to compose songs that worked. They played a couple of gigs on campus. Sometimes they handed out free CDs to get their name out. But money was always tight, and they needed better equipment.
Tosin views himself as an entrepreneur. He proudly points out that he came from a family of self-starters. So, he says, he started looking for opportunities to make some extra cash. He landed on an idea - one that, in retrospect, might not have been the best. It involved the Internet and guns.
ODUWOLE: And so I was thinking, OK, you know, maybe this could be, like, a beginner business where I could buy these guns very cheap from the manufacturers online, have them shipped to a local dealer and then resell them for retail price and make a little bit of money. And we could use this money and buy all the equipment - studio equipment that we could dream of - because that was one thing that was kind of harming us our first six or seven months. The equipment that we were recording music with was very bad. It was just - you know, the final songs - there'd be a lot of static, and - we just knew we needed better equipment.
VEDANTAM: What Tosin was thinking off is called drop shipping. It's used all the time in online sales. When you buy a product online from a retailer, that product isn't necessarily sitting in the retailer's warehouse. Sometimes the retailer has to order it from a wholesaler. You've paid for a product the retailer doesn't physically possess. Tosin thought he could adapt this model to the online gun market - buy guns wholesale, and then mark up the price.
ODUWOLE: The basic business idea was buy low; sell high - period.
VEDANTAM: Tosin advertised guns for sale online. Once people bought them, he ordered the guns from the wholesaler. But with gun sales, there's a catch. Guns bought wholesale must go through a licensed gun dealer before they can pass on to a buyer. That didn't worry Tosin. He wasn't doing anything illegal. He contacted a local gun dealer and asked him to put through the transaction.
ODUWOLE: And so that was what I was doing. You know, I never took possession of those guns. I never intended to. I never did.
VEDANTAM: Tosin agrees that he called the gun dealer repeatedly to ask about the weapons. But that's because, he says, he had already accepted money from buyers and needed to complete the transaction.
So to recap, we have a young man with big dreams. He's got a budding career as a rapper, an active social life and a commitment to community service. He's buying guns, but only, he says, to sell them and make a little extra cash for music equipment. This is not the picture of a would-be terrorist. But that brings us to that piece of paper that police found in Tosin's car. As State's Attorney Tom Gibbons put it...
GIBBONS: They found, you know, visible in the car, a note.
VEDANTAM: It had music lyrics on one side but a threat on the other.
GIBBONS: Send $2 to - and then it's a PayPal account. If the money doesn't reach $50,000 in the next seven days, then a murderous rampage similar to the Virginia Tech shooting will occur at another highly populated university, and then, in all capital letters, this is not a joke.
VEDANTAM: It would be hard to explain away a note like this demanding ransom, threatening a campus massacre. But Tosin says the problem lies in one word, note. What the police found, he insists, was not a note. It was scribbled ideas for a rap song. This is how Tosin says it all unfolded. It began as an idea one night in the artist den. Tosin had just finished watching the TV show "Law & Order." The episode was about some bloggers who livestreamed their home on social media.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LAW AND ORDER")
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: (As Willow) So it's me, Willow, again. A lot of you commented on the fight that Holden and I had in yesterday's video.
ODUWOLE: And so the way the episode started off...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LAW AND ORDER")
TRACHTENBERG: (As Willow) Granted, a few of the things he said...
ODUWOLE: ...While they were livestreaming, just hanging out, masked men kick in the door, kidnap the girl, beat up her boyfriend. And then later, they get back on her online page and start a ransom.
VEDANTAM: Tosin was fascinated by the episode. He loved the way it played with viewers. All the way through, it kept people guessing. Were they watching an actual kidnapping take place online? Were they watching performance art? Tosin thought the premise might make a cool spoken introduction to a rap song.
ODUWOLE: And so that was where the idea - I was trying to figure out something - I tried to figure out something that would be real to what's actually in life. Like, there is PayPal, and there is YouTube. And there is et cetera, et cetera. And so it was kind of like a copy of that but into something that wasn't as fake as that, something that was actually real.
VEDANTAM: Sometimes rap songs start this way, with introductions that set a scene with lyrics that don't rhyme. That, says Tosin's friend Thomas, is what they were playing with.
PHILLIPS: Have you heard the introduction to Nas's "It Was Written?"
VEDANTAM: I haven't. What - how does it go?
PHILLIPS: It starts off with two slaves in a field. And this is set back in, you know, the slavery days, so - in American history. So what happens is that the two slaves hear the overseer coming, and they decide to stage, you know, a revolt right at that point.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALBUM INTRO")
NAS: Damn you, master. You ain't my master, man. You ain't nothing. You ain't nothing.
PHILLIPS: And you hear the slaves beating the master down. And then you hear the - you know, the slaves being dragged away once the revolt's pretty much quelled at that point.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALBUM INTRO")
NAS: Hey, boy, you see what they done did to Jimmy and Lee?
PHILLIPS: So it's an introduction that draws you in. And you hear this violent introduction, and then the lead song comes on.
VEDANTAM: Tosin wondered whether the demand for a ransom and the threat of a campus shooting could make for a good intro. The friends played with the idea and tried out a few things. They wrote some lyrics on a piece of paper. They even made a lyric video where the words of a song scroll on the screen.
Tosin felt it didn't work. But some of the lines he wrote on the other side of the paper did eventually become a song.
ODUWOLE: It was called "Pop It, Mami, Pop It." It's, like, a club song. It's about, like, girls dancing in a club.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "POP IT, MAMI, POP IT")
ODUWOLE: (Singing) Pop it, mami, pop it. Pop it, mami, pop it - go on ahead drop it for me. Pop it, mami, pop it.
I wrote it complete from beginning to end.
VEDANTAM: The lyrics on the other side of the paper were the ones that Tosin discarded. It was the reference to the Virginia Tech shootings, the threat of a mass killing. When Tosin decided to move back to campus sometime later, he threw all his notebooks and paper and clothes into his car to move them to a dorm. One sheet of paper slipped under the center console. It was the sheet police would later find in his car.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: Tosin says the police simply had him wrong. He wasn't a terrorist in the making. He was a student, a musician, a budding entrepreneur. He left his car on a campus side road for a simple reason. He'd run out of gas. He says he was going to get more fuel when he got paid at the end of the week. And that loaded gun in his dorm - Tosin agrees he shouldn't have had the gun in campus housing. But he insists it was an innocent mistake. He'd legally registered the weapon and thought that that made it OK to have it with him on campus. Both Tosin and his friend Thomas say owning guns was not unusual in their part of the Midwest. It just wasn't a big deal.
PHILLIPS: One of the things that I kind of want to, like, make sure that everybody's clear on is that down in southern Illinois and St. Louis, Mo., area and all that, there was a pretty big gun culture. So when we moved off campus, one of the things that he mentioned that he wanted to do and that we both ended up doing was applying for our FOID cards, the firearm identification that Illinois has. You have to get an ID to own or carry a firearm.
VEDANTAM: Thomas and Tosin both say they had no idea the police were poking around. So when the cops burst into their dorm and arrested Tosin, it came as a complete surprise.
ODUWOLE: So as far as in my mind, I'm thinking, OK, maybe I have a warrant for a ticket or - I really didn't know what was going on. And so I asked them several times that - can I call my dad? Like, I want to call my dad just to let him know what's going on. Can I call my older brother? And they wouldn't let me make any phone calls.
VEDANTAM: He says it wasn't until a couple of days later, when Thomas came to visit, that he actually began to understand what was going on.
ODUWOLE: So I picked up the phone and was talking to him through the glass. And the first thing he asked me was how am I. I said, I'm fine, man, just trying to figure out what's going on. And then that's when he says, do you remember that night when we were writing and producing and you wrote the thing about the PayPal account and the thing we got from the "Law & Order" episode? And I was like, yeah. And then he says, that's what this is about. And so when - he said that twice. He said, that's what this is about.
VEDANTAM: Tosin worried they thought he was a terrorist. And then came the charge for attempted terrorist threat.
ODUWOLE: I'd never heard of a charge like that before, you know, attempted terrorist threat, not a terrorist threat.
VEDANTAM: Still, Tosin was sure the confusion would soon be cleared up.
ODUWOLE: You know, as soon as my dad gets here with our lawyer, we'll be able to explain this. And, you know, and that'll be the end of it. They made a mistake, and we can go back to our lives.
VEDANTAM: But when the story hit the news, Tosin says everything got warped.
ODUWOLE: They were saying a Nigerian citizen, Olutosin Oduwole, and making it seem like I was, like, a foreigner that, like, came over here - and just the way I was being portrayed as if, like, I was a terrorist. And of course, my name was mispronounced on purpose to make it sound really, really foreign and just different. And they were not describing me like I was a kid born and raised in St. Louis, Mo.
VEDANTAM: The news media kept harping on the note. They distorted it, Tosin says.
ODUWOLE: And so, yeah - so when you now paint it that way, as a note and violence and guns, it's very easy to make anybody feel like, oh, yeah, this was one bad guy - because you can craft information and make something appear the way you want to if you have the upper hand.
VEDANTAM: Tosin says no one in law enforcement wanted to hear his side of the story. Thomas Phillips felt the same. After police initially talked to Thomas, he tried to go back to them and explained that they had it all wrong.
PHILLIPS: It's a shame that I can actually tell somebody, like, a law enforcement official after the initial interview, this is what actually has happened; could you all add this to the story - and that no one's going to hear it because everybody's mind's already made up with what actually appears to be the case.
VEDANTAM: Why did that happen? There were lots of issues - race, culture, the fear of a mass shooting. And there was the music.
CHARIS KUBRIN: After we ran the analysis, we found that in every dimension, rap lyrics were evaluated more negatively compared to when the lyrics were perceived to be country.
VEDANTAM: Stay with us.
A few months after Tosin was arrested, a visitor showed up to meet Jeffrey Urdangen, a professor and lawyer at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. The man was Toyin Oduwole, Tosin's father.
JEFFREY URDANGEN: Toyin was unruffled and extremely poised and dignified.
VEDANTAM: Tosin's father wanted Jeffrey to take on his son's case. He was intrigued and agreed. Jeffrey drove five hours south to see Tosin at the Madison County Jail.
URDANGEN: It was a contact visit because I was an attorney, and that was our first meeting. He was - if I recall, he was shackled at the ankles and handcuffed at his wrists. And he was a quiet, young guy, great eye contact, not particularly frightened like so many people are in that situation.
VEDANTAM: In light of the Virginia Tech massacre, Jeffrey says he understood why police suspected Tosin. But he says they should have quickly figured out that they were off track.
URDANGEN: Once you did your investigation, you should have known that you were off on a fool's errand. You should have known, and it wouldn't have taken too much effort to realize that he was not plotting or planning some kind of massacre. You could have realized and seen very readily that these were lyrics. In fact, there were lyrics on the opposite side, if I recall, of that note - on both sides. And I believe that there were lyrics throughout the car. And his apartment, when they searched it, they found notebooks with hundreds of pages of rap lyrics.
VEDANTAM: Investigators were unable to find evidence that Tosin had a violent side. Teachers and students maintained he wasn't threatening. But the prosecution disagreed. State's Attorney Tom Gibbons says despite Tosin's insistence that what was on the paper were lyrics, he remains certain that they were not.
GIBBONS: I've probably read at least a thousand pages of his writing to get to know the mind of Olutosin Oduwole and to understand the difference between the types of writings that he did. And so, you know, having - and after reviewing all that, spending a lot of time looking at it, mostly in my free time at night, I became convinced that, in fact, this was genuinely a crime. This was an individual planning a very serious crime. This was not prosecuting someone for writing lyrics. This was prosecuting somebody for all of the substantial steps that he had taken toward very serious crimes and potentially a mass casualty event.
VEDANTAM: So now we have two different stories. One is a tale of a potential terrorist plotting a campus massacre. Another is a story of a young man who has unlawfully stored a gun at his university, but otherwise has done little wrong. It would be up to a jury to decide which story was the truthful one and how to understand those words written on that piece of paper. But before we head to trial, I want to introduce you to one more person.
KUBRIN: My name is Charis Kubrin, and I'm a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine.
VEDANTAM: Charis was called as an expert for the defense in Tosin's case, in part because of some interesting research she's done. She was noticing a large number of prosecutions that were introducing rap lyrics in court. She had a basic question.
KUBRIN: Are violent lyrics perceived as more threatening, more dangerous, more literal, more in need of regulation when they are described as rap compared to other music genres?
VEDANTAM: This question, she felt, was intricately linked to the outcomes of criminal cases.
KUBRIN: Because prosecutors are using rap lyrics as evidence in these criminal trials, I felt this raises a whole host of questions about whether prosecutors, judges, jurors may be relying on perception and stereotype about rappers and rap music in their interpretation and evaluation of the lyrics.
VEDANTAM: So Charis devised a study. She pulled lyrics from a 1960s folk song.
KUBRIN: We identified a set of violent lyrics. It was actually lyrics from the song "Bad Man's Blunder." And it's a Kingston Trio - folk group from the '60s. And the lyrics go something like this. Well, early one evening, I was rolling around. I was feeling kind of mean. I shot a deputy down. Strolling on home and I went to bed. Well, I laid my pistol up under my head. Well, early in the morning, about the break of day, I figured it was time to make a getaway. Stepping right along, but I was stepping too slow. Got surrounded by a sheriff down in Mexico.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BAD MAN'S BLUNDER")
THE KINGSTON TRIO: (Singing) Well, early in the morning, about the break of day, I figured it was time to make a getaway. Stepping right along, but I was stepping too slow, got surrounded by a sheriff down in Mexico. He was stepping right along...
KUBRIN: So we took this set of violent lyrics, and we told participants in our experiment that they were either rap lyrics or country music lyrics.
VEDANTAM: Charis then asked them how threatening and offensive they perceived the lyrics to be and whether they felt the lyrics should be regulated.
KUBRIN: And after we ran the analysis, we found that in every dimension, rap lyrics were evaluated more negatively compared to when the lyrics were perceived to be country.
VEDANTAM: Charis then replicated the study. Again, she didn't play songs for volunteers. She just printed out the lyrics from a Johnny Cash song.
KUBRIN: Called "Boy Named Sue."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A BOY NAMED SUE")
JOHNNY CASH: (Singing) But I busted a chair right across his teeth, and we crashed through the wall and into the street, kicking and...
KUBRIN: And by the way, Johnny Cash gets invoked a lot because everyone knows his, you know, his song, I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die (laughter) - right? And so Johnny Cash gets kind of invoked, like, well, why can Johnny Cash say lyrics like that, where he's shooting a man in Reno, and there's other violence, but when rappers do it, it's seen as literal?
But anyway, we selected these lyrics from "A Boy Named Sue." Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes. And he went down, but to my surprise he came up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear. But I busted a chair right across his teeth, and we crashed through the wall and into the street, kicking and gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A BOY NAMED SUE")
CASH: (Singing) I tell you, I've fought tougher men, but I really can't remember when. He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile.
KUBRIN: We found that those people who thought that those were rap lyrics were much more likely to evaluate them negatively on all those dimensions compared to those participants in our study who thought they were country.
VEDANTAM: As a criminologist, Charis says her results are troubling.
KUBRIN: I am not necessarily advocating to not find people guilty of a crime that they've committed. What I am advocating for is the use of proper techniques and proper evidence to arrive at that decision. Right now, prosecutors are relying too heavily on a form of artistic expression that is fictional, that has a lot of artistic conventions, knowing full well that the vast majority of jurors and judges don't really know what the artistic conventions of rap music are.
The prosecutors, in this sense, are taking shortcuts. And it's at the expense of people's lives. And by the way, no other form of artistic expression is treated this way in the courts because it's not as if rock musicians and heavy metal musicians and punk musicians are having their lyrics introduced as evidence against them. This is happening only for rappers and rap music.
VEDANTAM: On October 18, 2011, in Madison County, Ill., Olutosin Oduwole's trial began. Jeffrey Urdangen says things went wrong from the start.
URDANGEN: You know, Olutosin Oduwole was a very dark-skinned Nigerian young man whose interest was rap. And the whole defense was centered around rap. The jury was all white, overwhelmingly rural. And the average age was in the 40s and 50s. So if you put that profile together - a 50-year-old, white, rural juror trying to understand our defense, who've - none of them, if I recall, had ever listened with any frequency to rap music. Some of them did not know what it was. But this was the jury that we ended up with. And so that was a problem.
VEDANTAM: Tom Gibbons did not argue the case but supervised the attorneys who did. He believes they acted with care and caution.
GIBBONS: I wanted to make absolutely sure that we weren't using the authority of the state's attorney's office to prosecute somebody for their thoughts, to prosecute somebody for, in this case, rap lyrics. That's not an appropriate use of the power of a prosecutor's office and the power of law enforcement.
VEDANTAM: Again, much of the attention was focused on that piece of paper that police found in Tosin's car. Tom Gibbons says the defense argued strenuously that the writing was rap lyrics.
GIBBONS: Although, I have to tell you, one of his lawyers tried to rap the words in this note in trial, and it was a miserable failure because these are not rap lyrics.
VEDANTAM: To this comment, Tosin just shakes his head. He admits the lyrics were not very good, which is why he didn't end up using them in his song. But they were still rap.
ODUWOLE: They didn't want to tell people it was rap music. They wanted to say it was a note. So they - and they didn't show where it rhymed, where it actually rhymed. If you don't know rap music and I just give you that sentence, where can you make it rhyme? It doesn't look like a rhyme. If this account doesn't reach 50 - 50,000 in seven days, get ready for a murderous rampage similar to the VT shooting will occur at another highly populated university, and this is not a joke.
So if you don't know rap music, you won't be able to piece that together. Majority of southern Illinois, Midwestern people that are 40, 50, 60 years old, prosecutors, police officers, they don't know how to break down rap music or anything. So when I said, hey, that was a, like, a small piece of, like, a rap verse that we didn't even want to use, they're like, get out of here. He's lying.
VEDANTAM: After a five-day trial, the jury returned its verdict - guilty. State's Attorney Tom Gibbons.
GIBBONS: The jury convicted Mr. Oduwole. They took all the evidence into account. They deliberated for - I don't recall the amount of time. I think it was a couple of hours at least. And they returned a verdict of guilty on both counts. And he was sentenced to five years in the department of corrections on the attempted terrorist threat and a year in the Madison County Jail on the unauthorized possession of a weapon based on the level of the offense.
VEDANTAM: Jeffrey Urdangen says that trial was a disaster.
URDANGEN: It was a First Amendment train wreck in my view.
VEDANTAM: Jeffrey sees two flaws in the prosecution's case. First, they criminalized speech.
URDANGEN: By taking a work of art, something that was intended as a work of art, and distorted it into criminal intent.
VEDANTAM: Second, he says, they criminalized thought.
URDANGEN: By criminalizing thought, what I mean is we need to charge this man with a crime because for all we know, he was thinking about acting on what we surmise were evil intents, even though we have no evidence that he intended to communicate that thought.
VEDANTAM: Tosin says his worst moment came after the trial at the Graham Correctional Center.
ODUWOLE: They strip you naked. They tell you to bend over. They make sure you don't, you know, you're not sneaking in any weapons, just a very degrading process. And then when they put me in a cell, and then they locked the door. And then you hear the clink. And it's a small cell. It's like 5-by-9, right? There's two metal bunk beds in there. And it's you and another guy. And you just feel so claustrophobic, but you can't leave.
VEDANTAM: Tosin says it felt like being punched in the gut. Jeffrey Urdangen appealed the conviction. A year and a half later, the case came before an appellate court. The conviction for the terrorist charge was overturned. The court said, in the absence of sufficient evidence that the defendant had taken a substantial step toward making a terrorist threat, his writings, as abhorrent as they might be, amount to mere thoughts.
Since Tosin's case went to trial, there have been many other cases in which rap artists have had their lyrics introduced as evidence in criminal proceedings. Criminologist Charis Kubrin.
KUBRIN: Not a lot of people know that this is happening. I don't think we quite understand the implications of using rap lyrics as evidence and what that means for defendants. Like, can they get a fair trial? Can we ensure that their First Amendment rights are protected when these lyrics have the potential to bias jurors?
VEDANTAM: When I met him at his home in New Jersey, Olutosin Oduwole was 31 years old. He says the trial, the conviction, the prison time, he's put all that behind him. But one thing still upsets him - having lyrics he considers embarrassingly bad attached to his name.
ODUWOLE: There's a lot of stuff that you will never hear, that you'll never see because I either didn't think it was good or I didn't think it would be received well. This was supposed to be one of those things that the world was never supposed to see or hear.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: Every artist, aspiring or well-established, knows what it's like to try something and then toss it aside. The drawing is askew. The photograph is blurry. The verses don't rhyme. The cutting room floor is littered with false starts and failed attempts, but these dead ends and errors are essential to the artistic process.
Tosin never ended up becoming a rap star. He's still a musician, but these days, he's more focused on his career in real estate. He's still buying low selling high. Tosin recently co-founded a real estate hedge fund in Atlanta. He now has a bachelor's degree in business management, and he's hoping to start a family one day. Some of Tosin's music did find the spotlight. People spent hours poring over his songs, analyzing his words. But like others before him, Tosin discovered that the artist doesn't always control how his creations are understood. Sometimes the stuff on the cutting room floor ends up being your legacy.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE ME")
ODUWOLE: (Rapping) I need you all to pay attention. You know what I'm saying, story of my life, I don't really get in too many details. Yeah, when I think about it, I ain't ever had a chance. Violent household, a**hole for a dad. Seldom ever smiled, I was always kind of sad. Teachers at school said that always kind of bad. I left home. I ain't come...
VEDANTAM: This episode of HIDDEN BRAIN was produced by Rhaina Cohen, Jenny Schmidt and Tara Boyle. Our team includes Parth Shah, Thomas Lu, Laura Kwerel and Cat Schuknecht. Original music for this episode was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. The song you're hearing was written and performed by Olutosin Oduwole. It's called "Love Me."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE ME")
ODUWOLE: (Rapping) But check this, though. I made the right move, took my a** to college. I owe God a lot. I'm still paying homage. I made it this far. He gave me patience. Oh, we four semesters away from graduating. If I learned anything, I learned this...
VEDANTAM: This week, we're saying goodbye to our intern Lushik Wahba. Lushik has been a vital member of the team from the moment she arrived. She's a stellar audio producer and has helped us build an archive that we can draw on for years to come. She's going to be deeply missed. Thank you, Lushik, for all that you brought to HIDDEN BRAIN.
Our unsung hero this week is Mary Glendinning. Mary is a research librarian at NPR, and she played a crucial role in tracking down information for this story. Mary and her team are fact-checkers, detectives, masters of the archives and data experts. Thank you, Mary, and all the researchers at NPR, for your very hard work.
For more HIDDEN BRAIN, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. I'm Shankar Vedantam, and this is NPR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM, HOST:
This is HIDDEN BRAIN. I'm Shankar Vedantam. For the past few weeks, we've been looking at how race, religion and identity intersect with the criminal justice system. Previous episodes have looked at the effectiveness of the broken windows policing strategy, the effects of implicit bias on shootings of unarmed black men by police officers and how music, specifically rap music, shapes the way judges and jurors think about crime.
Today, we shift our attention to terrorism. In a speech in early February, President Donald Trump talked about the dangers of what he called radical Islamic terrorism.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Radical Islamic terrorists are determined to strike our homeland as they did on 9/11, as they did from Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino.
VEDANTAM: He criticized the media for not adequately reporting on the threat.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported. And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it.
VEDANTAM: Is the president correct? Is the media failing to report accurately on terrorism? Is political correctness keeping us from grasping the true danger we face?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MICHAEL FLYNN: Political correctness kills. It causes - it will cause death.
JAMES WOOLSEY: You can't fight something effectively that you can't talk about.
VEDANTAM: This week, we step away from the politicians and the pundits to look at the empirical evidence, social science research into how the American media actually cover terrorist attacks. We will also look at what effect that has on our perceptions of terrorism and our attitudes toward the Muslim community. New research has found that there are indeed systematic biases in coverage but not in the way President Trump suggests.
ERIN KEARNS: A perpetrator who is not Muslim would have to kill on average about seven more people to receive the same amount of coverage as a perpetrator who's Muslim.
VEDANTAM: How the media cover terrorism and what effect this has on us, this week on HIDDEN BRAIN.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: In 2014, two terrorist attacks occurred six months apart. They had eerie similarities. In both cases, two police officers were shot and killed. In both cases, a third victim was shot as well. Both ended with the perpetrators killing themselves. In the aftermath of the attacks, investigators learned of criminal records, missed red flags and anti-government threats on social media.
The first incident occurred in June 2014 in Las Vegas. It was carried out by a husband and wife team.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST #1: We learned this afternoon the identities of a Las Vegas couple who ambushed and killed two police officers and gunned down a civilian who tried to stop them.
VEDANTAM: The couple was Jerad and Amanda Miller.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST #2: Investigators described Jerad and Amanda Miller as anti-government and on a mission to kill police officers.
VEDANTAM: On the day of the shooting, Jerad posted this on Facebook - the dawn of a new day, may all our coming sacrifices be worth it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST #2: The Millers then covered the bodies with a swastika and a Gadsden flag, first used in the American Revolution, emblazoned with the words don't tread on me.
VEDANTAM: They left a note on the bodies of the slain officers. It read, this is the beginning of a revolution. The couple then walked to a nearby Walmart and ordered customers out. When they were challenged by one person, they killed him too. The rampage ended when the couple were confronted by authorities. Amanda shot and killed her husband and then killed herself. That was the first attack.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VEDANTAM: The second one that we'll examine today occurred later the same year in late December. Before dawn on the morning of December 20, Ishmael Brinsley let himself into his ex-girlfriend's apartment in a Baltimore suburb. He pointed a gun at his own head and threatened to kill himself. When she talked him out of it, he shot her instead. She was injured but survived.
Ishmael then got on a bus to New York, where he shot and killed two police officers in Brooklyn. In a note he'd posted to social media earlier, he said he was intent on carrying out retribution for police killings of unarmed black men.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST #3: Police say one of the last posts he put on social media was this - I always wanted to be known for doing something right, he said. But my past is stalking me, and my present is haunting me. The post followed with another ominous warning. I'm putting wings on pigs today, he wrote. They take one of ours. Let's take two of theirs.
KEARNS: On balance, these two incidents are fairly similar in that they've both killed two police officers, so we should expect more coverage because of the targets, because of the fatalities.
VEDANTAM: This is Erin Kearns. She's a criminologist to Georgia State University. Erin and her colleagues have been studying the way that the media cover terrorist attacks and the amount of coverage different incidents receive.
KEARNS: The Millers actually killed an additional person. So you'd expect that, if anything, that might have a little bit more coverage.
VEDANTAM: But that isn't what Erin and her co-authors found.
KEARNS: Ishmael Brinsley received about four-and-a-half times more coverage than the Millers, and he was Muslim.
VEDANTAM: The fact that Ishmael Brinsley's case received so much more coverage than Jerad and Amanda Miller's could be explained by a number of factors. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that his attack was in New York City, while the Millers were in Las Vegas. New York is a bigger city, the center of the news media. Concerns about Mayor Bill de Blasio's relationship with the New York Police Department may have added fuel to the fire. The story came at a time when race and policing was often in the news. But Erin Kearns and her fellow researchers have found there is another factor that determines which attacks catch the attention of the media and which don't.
KEARNS: When the perpetrator is Muslim, you can expect that attack to receive about four-and-a-half times more media coverage than if the perpetrator was not Muslim.
VEDANTAM: Put another way...
KEARNS: A perpetrator who is not Muslim would have to kill on average about 7 more people to receive the same amount of coverage as a perpetrator who's Muslim.
VEDANTAM: Perhaps this is not a huge surprise to you. If you've watched coverage of a recent terrorist attack, you might have a sense that this was the case.
KEARNS: The results themselves I don't think were very surprising to myself and to my colleagues. The magnitude of the findings, though, is something that we were all taken a little bit aback by, that it's such a drastic difference in coverage when the perpetrator is Muslim.
VEDANTAM: Erin and her colleagues did not include broadcast journalism in their data set. In other words, this analysis does not encompass the dramatic coverage on cable news, coverage like this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST #4: U.S. officials believe Farook's wife, Tashfeen Malik, had been radicalized before stepping foot in the U.S., raising alarm bells about the fiancee visa she came in on.
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST #5: And as we've been reporting, law enforcement officials identifying their suspect as 29-year-old Omar Seddique Mateen, as we've said, a U.S. citizen.
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST #6: But we should also point out that the New York Daily News has been on a jihad against conservatives over the...
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST#5: Right.
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST #6: ...Last couple of weeks.
VEDANTAM: The researchers looked mostly at print news sources like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, local papers from around the country, as well as cnn.com. Ironically, it's these mainstream media outlets that are routinely accused of political correctness in their coverage of terrorism. The researchers studied these sources for their coverage of terrorist incidents within the United States.
They looked at a five-year period from 2011 to 2015. This study did not look at foreign news source's coverage of terrorism or how the U.S. media outlets cover terrorism in other countries. To identify cases to study, the researchers used a dataset called the Global Terrorism Database.
KEARNS: The way that terrorism is defined within the Global Terrorism Database is talking about the threat or use of violence, the incident having a political, religious, social or economic motive, being committed by a noncombatant and with the goal being to, you know, for fear, to coerce or intimidate a population.
VEDANTAM: Jerad and Amanda Miller were self-identified white supremacists. They were affiliated with a far-right group. They intentionally sought out and killed police officers and said it was the beginning of a revolution. This would fall cleanly under the Global Terrorism Database's definition of terrorism. But Erin and her co-authors have noticed that the media and, in turn, the public, do not apply the terrorism label evenly. That was the case with another attack that same year.
KEARNS: After the Frazier Glenn Miller attack in Kansas back in 2014, where Frazier Glenn Miller, who was a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, killed three people at a synagogue, yelled Heil Hitler at the end of the attack, this wasn't described as terrorism very commonly in the media, which led one of my co-authors, Dr. Anthony Lemieux, to write a piece then about why we aren't applying this label to this particular attack, even though it clearly fits within it.
VEDANTAM: To examine how people draw conclusions about which cases of terrorism should be labeled terrorism, the researchers conducted a study.
KEARNS: We have presented participants with real-life terrorist attacks. And what we found is that when the perpetrator of those attacks was Muslim, people were much more likely to consider it to be terrorism than when the perpetrator was not Muslim. In those cases, people were more likely to say that perhaps it's a hate crime or not be sure how to classify it.
VEDANTAM: The problem with studying actual incidents of terrorism is that each one has many idiosyncratic features. It's difficult to tell whether differences in perception and coverage in cases such as the Jerad and Amanda Miller shooting and the Ishmael Brinsley shooting are because of the identity of the perpetrator or some other factor.
To address this problem, the researchers conducted an experiment. They controlled for all sorts of different factors. Volunteers were given descriptions of fake terrorist attacks, including the location, the number of casualties and other details. Holding everything constant, volunteers saw the cases differently when the perpetrator was Muslim.
KEARNS: What we found here, again, is that even if the target's the same, the weapon is the same, if the perpetrator is Muslim, the participants are much more likely to consider that to be terrorism.
VEDANTAM: The tendency not to give some cases of terrorism that label and to cover other cases more intensively shapes the way we all think about the phenomenon. Erin and her colleagues looked at how many terrorist attacks in the United States are actually carried out by Muslim extremists. The result might surprise you.
KEARNS: So if we look at these attacks in this five-year window, we see that only about 12 percent of them were perpetrated by Muslims, whereas over 50 percent actually were perpetrated by some far-right cause. But most people don't perceive that as being what the actual threat is.
VEDANTAM: To be clear, that 12 percent number is disproportionate. Muslims account for just 1 percent of the U.S. population. But in a rational world, this should mean that 12 percent of the media's coverage of terrorism would be of terrorism committed by Muslims. When we come back, we'll hear about some of the psychological reasons this doesn't happen. Stay with us.
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MUNIBA SALEEM: My name is Muniba Saleem, and I am an assistant professor at the Department of Communication Studies at University of Michigan.
VEDANTAM: Muniba Saleem studies how the media cover terrorism. She's also interested in how the media can change the way we relate to one another. Her interest in these subjects goes back to her own childhood. Muniba, who is Muslim, was in high school in Ohio when the Sept. 11 attacks occurred.
SALEEM: As even a high school student, had to answer questions regarding, you know, why did this individual think that this was the right thing to do? Or what does my faith say about these kinds of actions? And to be honest, at that point, I'm not sure if I even knew what to say or how to answer these kinds of questions. But I did have to answer them, nonetheless.
VEDANTAM: As a teenager, she struggled to understand the shift in the way others thought of her.
SALEEM: The fact that I was a Muslim was enough to put me in the same category as these perpetrators who had committed these terrible crimes. And it didn't matter that I was a teenager or that I was an American or that I was Pakistani. It just - what mattered was that Muslim identity. That seemed to kind of over-encompass all of the other information that people had about me.
And so I was asked questions, you know, regarding, you know, what is Islam? What does it say about these acts of terrorism? And do you believe in the kinds of things that these people did? Do you sympathize with what they have done? Do you hate Americans? Are you anti - I mean, all of these series of questions that I had honestly never faced before.
VEDANTAM: Muniba remembers one instance several years later where she was watching a play and there was a joke about American politics.
SALEEM: The entire audience laughed in the theater, and I'd laughed as well, as did my friends and this couple that was sitting next to me. But then I noticed that they were very aware of the fact that I was laughing. And during the intermission, they made this comment where the lady turned around and she said, you know, it wouldn't hurt you to be more supportive of America. And I thought about why was I being pointed out for laughing, as opposed to everybody else in the audience who also thought that that was a funny comment?
VEDANTAM: As a social psychologist today, Muniba Saleem understands many things she did not understand as a 15-year-old kid in Ohio. Terrorism doesn't just have physical consequences. It has a number of psychological effects. For one thing, simply reminding people of death, as Sept. 11 certainly did, can change the way people think.
SALEEM: It did a lot of things. It increased, you know, this concept of mortality, which psychology shows that whenever that happens, we also then tend to have more in-group cohesion, which basically means that we tend to kind of stick to our in-groups. We tend to be more patriotic. We tend to support things that are of our nation a little bit more. So it provided a lot of those kinds of psychological effects as well.
VEDANTAM: Muniba also came to understand why many Muslims were seen with suspicion in post-9/11 America. It has to do with something called salience. When you look out at the world, certain details seem to pop out at you. They are more salient than others.
SALEEM: We generally like to think about ourselves and the groups to which we belong in a more positive manner because it makes us feel good about ourselves. So any group that we are not a part of, that's what's referred to as our out-groups. And so that information is always going to be examined a little bit more closely and scrutinized a little bit more closely. So what that means is, as a woman, for me, the behavior of other women is perhaps - especially when it's negative, is not going to be as salient as the behavior of another man.
So one of those key elements is the fact that for a lot of our American audience who are non-Muslim, that Muslim identity was salient. The second part, of course, is that the perpetrators had claimed that they were doing this in the name of Islam. And so that identity or that label became very salient in people's minds.
VEDANTAM: You might ask why some identities become more salient than others. For example, the majority of terrorist attacks are carried out by men. But, while it's very common for Muniba to be questioned about why Muslims commit acts of terrorism, no one has ever asked me to explain why men become terrorists. Muniba says that has to do with who's in the majority and who's not.
SALEEM: Think about it as a jar of red marbles. If you only have a single blue marble within that jar, then wherever that blue marble is moving, that's going to become very salient to you. Because in that jar of red marbles, that blue marble sticks out a little bit more. And so I think there's a little bit of that happening in the way in which we oftentimes encounter news stories that are referring to racial and ethnic minorities.
VEDANTAM: Of course, the 9/11 attackers explicitly said they were acting in the name of all Muslims. They didn't say they were acting in the name of all men. But Muniba's point is that because Muslims are a small minority and men are not, the misdeeds of Muslims become salient to us. This also holds true for other minorities and other crimes.
The researcher Shanto Iyengar at Stanford University once conducted a study where he presented stories about local crime to volunteers. He found that when volunteers saw that an African-American perpetrator was responsible for a crime, volunteers tended to extrapolate the stigma of criminality to African-Americans as a group. When a white American was responsible for an identical crime, volunteers typically saw the criminal as being an individual, an aberration rather than the rule.
Terrorist attacks also trigger another psychological phenomenon. Whereas normally we might see that a group of a billion people has enormous diversity, all kinds of different attitudes and political views, terrorism causes many Americans to view the entire Muslim world as fundamentally homogenous.
SALEEM: The idea behind that phenomena is actually referred to as out-group homogeneity. And all that is saying is that when the behavior or when the action is involving an out-group - the group that you don't belong to - then you think that all individuals within that group are, in fact, represented by that particular idea or that particular attribute. So you think that the entire out-group is homogeneous and they're all the same, they all talk the same, they all behave the same. So if one of them did something, then others must believe and act in the same way as well.
VEDANTAM: The way the media portray terrorism has serious effects not just on our perceptions of Muslims but on the public policies we support. In one study Muniba conducted, volunteers were randomly assigned to watch different clips of Muslims before answering a series of questions. Some volunteers watched news clips in which Muslims were represented as terrorists. Others saw neutral clips about Muslims. A third group saw positive news clips, clips that showed Muslims volunteering in their communities.
SALEEM: And immediately after being exposed to the video clips, we asked them what they think about Muslims in terms of how aggressive they are, how violent they are. But we also asked them whether they support various kinds of public policies that are targeting Muslims. And some of these were policies that were more for international countries, so military action in Muslim countries. And other policies were more domestic, so harsher civil restrictions for Muslim-Americans.
And what we discovered is that participants who were in the negative news condition ended up thinking of Muslims as more aggressive, as more violent and subsequently supported policies that were targeting Muslims both domestically and internationally compared to those who were in the neutral or positive news condition. So continuous coverage of Muslims as terrorists is simply activating and strengthening these kinds of associations, ultimately facilitating us to think of Muslims in an aggressive manner and then support harmful behavior towards them.
VEDANTAM: What was striking about this paper was not just that people supported aggressive foreign policy interventions, but they actually supported more aggressive policies toward American citizens who happen to be Muslim.
SALEEM: That was actually fascinating for me to know that a lot of Americans are not differentiating between Muslims who are living in other countries versus Muslim-Americans who are citizens and who are perhaps their neighbors and their friends. So we saw people supporting policies such as domestic surveillance without the consent of Muslim-Americans.
We saw individuals supporting perhaps that Muslim Americans should not be allowed to vote, that they should have separate and more thorough airport security lines, that they should be monitored, you know, by the government, their phones should be tapped without their consent, all kinds of unconstitutional policies. We saw Americans supporting those.
VEDANTAM: So when I look at this body of research, what I'm seeing when I step back and look at it is a series of processes that in some ways are driven by, you know, fairly understandable and normal, you know, human mental processes - the idea that we see aberrational things or unusual things happening together, we draw correlations between them, we see patterns. And members of the news media, of course, are human beings, and so they gravitate towards certain stories and cover those stories more aggressively because those stories stick out in their minds, they're more salient.
As a result of that kind of media coverage, your research is finding that the attitudes of Americans themselves is changing in a way that becomes hostile toward people living in their communities who are fellow American citizens who happen to be Muslim. And, you know, what is so troubling is that these relatively innocuous psychological biases can eventually have consequences that are anything but innocuous.
SALEEM: I think what's really important is to realize that these biases are not just simply something that's in our head but they are, in fact, affecting our behaviors and our public policy decisions towards Muslims both in this country and outside. And also, the other side of things, which I actually just recently started looking at, is how the same media representations are influencing Muslim-American youth and adolescents who are growing up in this country who identify both as Muslim and as American.
It's making them feel as if they cannot be both of those identities, even though there is no reason why they should feel that way. They're having to feel as if they have to choose one over the other because they're being questioned about their American identity on account of being Muslim. They're having to answer questions about their loyalty, their patriotism as an American. And that is, in fact, affecting how they think about themselves psychologically, their physical health, their self-esteem and a host of other important consequences.
VEDANTAM: In some ways, these findings are disheartening. It does feel like a vicious cycle. I asked Muniba if she saw any way to combat the psychological biases that terrorism produces.
SALEEM: I think one of the greatest ways to break the cycle - and this is supported by both anecdotal evidence but also research - is contact. Increased contact with Muslims, of course, especially when it's positive, tends to decrease reliance on these kinds of biases and then subsequently, you know, support for these kinds of harmful actions.
So time and time after again, we see that those Americans who have more contact with Muslims and more frequent contact tend to report less of these kinds of biases, tend to not support these kinds of policies as much. They tend to look at the media reports in a more critical manner. And they have a very good understanding that what they see in the media is not the entire story. So contact is definitely one of the most important things that we can talk about and we can encourage individuals to pursue in order to break this vicious cycle.
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VEDANTAM: Muniba Saleem is a social psychologist at the University of Michigan. This episode of HIDDEN BRAIN was produced by Maggie Penmen and Rhaina Cohen. Our staff includes Jenny Schmidt, Renee Klahr and Parth Shah. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle.
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VEDANTAM: Our unsung heroes this week are the staff of NPR One. Via Klee (ph), Emily Barocas and Jenny Gathright handpick stories that help listeners find shows like HIDDEN BRAIN. You can download the NPR One app in the app store. That's NPR O-N-E. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and listen for my stories each week on your local public radio station. If you like this episode, please give us a rating on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Shankar Vedantam, and this is NPR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.