Kamala Harris, Tom Emmer and the subject of crime …

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Kamala Harris’s campaign for president was one day old when U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota posted on X that she had supported a bail fund for “Minnesota criminals who should have stayed behind bars,” and that she “sprung from prison” a “convict” who killed a man.

This message was quickly amplified by Fox News and the Donald Trump campaign, and at the rally in St. Cloud on Saturday Trump and Emmer repeated attacks on Harris for supporting the bail fund.

We are going to see a lot of this kind of thing in the next three months. Emmer’s post was such a pristine example of the snares in modern campaign messaging that it offers us some basic lessons on how to protect ourselves.

To begin with, Emmer’s post was false. As the Star Tribune reported, the congressman was referring to a social media post by Harris in 2020 urging people to support the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF), a nonprofit organization which pays bail for people charged with crimes.

Bail is set by the court to allow a person to be released from jail before their trial. Thus, the person is not a “convict” serving prison time, but a citizen presumed innocent.

These falsehoods are not earth-shattering. The problem is that such distortions have become so commonplace that they sail by without notice. Instead of feeling it necessary to correct the misinformation, Emmer did not respond to a request from the Star Tribune for an interview about his post, then attacked the newspaper for “carry[ing] the water” for the Democrats.

So rule No. 1 for us information consumers, obviously, is simply to assume campaign statements may be false.

OK, I suspect Emmer’s fans will be saying that he misstated some technical details but that he got right the basic point that crime and Harris’s record on it are important campaign issues. Fair enough. But that leads me to the second problem with his post: His message is a sound bite that is inherently misleading because it lacks any context.

I joined the first board of the Minnesota Freedom Fund in 2017 because I was tired of the stark unfairness of the bail system. The bail set by the court is supposed to be a means of release, not a bar to release. People with some money, or those with friends or family who have it, go free. Poor people stay in jail. Some of these eventually have their cases dismissed, and the distress of incarceration pushes many to plead guilty in order to be sentenced to “time served” — meaning they stayed in jail when they were presumed innocent and were released when they were convicted!

For 3,000 people in jail and immigration detention, the Minnesota Freedom Fund has accepted the invitation offered by the courts that those people be released upon the payment of money — dollars that other people could ask a friend to get at a cash machine or a bank, but they could not. Thus, Emmer’s legitimate concerns about the conduct of people out on bail should be addressed to the court, not laid at the feet of a humanitarian organization like the MFF, which is trying to make the system work, and the people who support it.

So rule No. 2 is pay no attention to sound bites, regardless of whether they are true.

It is at the deepest level, however, that Emmer’s post is the most problematic, because it exploits a fundamental weak spot in our human nature. Humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to live in tightly knit groups. We have highly developed capacities for empathy and cooperation.

However, the very same mental machinery that enables us to bond together so smoothly also labels outsiders as “others.” Such others include bullies and misfits within our group as well as enemies outside the group.

This mental equipment judges “others” differently from “us.” In my experience this consists of forming a flat two-dimensional picture of others and a fuller three-dimensional view of our friends and allies, people worthy of fair treatment.

It is remarkably easy to conjure up in people’s minds an image of a horde of sinister two-dimensional “others”: Just label strangers with a pejorative term like “migrants,” “terrorists” or “the homeless.” Or in Emmer’s case, “criminals.”

About 40 years ago I had a graphic experience seeing a two-dimensional image deepen into three dimensions before my eyes. I was prosecuting a gang for murder and multiple robberies of liquor stores, and we solidified our case by offering the youngest member 10 years in prison in exchange for testifying against the others.

My image of him was pure 2D — a gangster, a ruthless criminal, a murderer. But as he spent many hours handcuffed to a chair in my office telling me and the detectives about his experiences in this gang, he evolved into a three-dimensional person — a boy, really, always afraid of the others and bullied by them, often hopeless, a trauma victim who had touching feelings for his mother and siblings.

This transformation happens in other settings. One of the reasons so much forgiveness is extended in restorative justice circles is because the hours of dialogue transform the offender into a three-dimensional person.

And the Star Tribune’s poignant story last week about Pablo, Efi and their four children being deported to Mexico after building a happy life here for four years was a beautiful example of making 2D “illegal migrants” into a 3D family next door.

So rule No. 3: Inoculate yourself from exploitation by recognizing that a campaign is messing with you whenever they trigger a two-dimensional image with a pejorative label.

Allow me to suggest the method that I use to make sure I am seeing a three-dimensional person who deserves to be treated fairly: I imagine that a person in jail or trying to cross the border or in need of public assistance is a friend of mine who is down on their luck.

We might ask Congressman Emmer: If a young friend of yours were charged with a crime, and a judge said he could be released from jail upon payment of $1,000 that he didn’t have, would you post his bail?

The combination of social media and political polarization has flooded us with false and manipulative information. I don’t know how to stop it, but I do know that we must not get lulled into becoming habituated to it.

Bruce Peterson is a senior district judge and teaches a class on lawyers as peacemakers at the University of Minnesota Law School.