but first i want to quickly thank rachel and anthony barkow and nyu center on criminal law for inviting me to participate in this conversation. so what i wanted to, in response to david's question, talk about is the ways in which race is discussed. so often when this conversation or when this topic is raised, we tend to focus on issues of character. so are the police rational, or are they racist when they stop african-americans or other non-whites at much higher rates than whites? is george zimmerman a bigot, or is he a concerned citizen? is trayvon martin an innocent victim or a thug in training? these are the ways in which we typically discuss race, and what i want to suggest is that our focus on character and conscious racial bias may actually mask the ways in which we can still achieve racially disproportionate consequences, even in the absence of conscious bias. and so the reason for this, in my view, is based on something that i call suspicion cascades. and these are the systemic and predictable errors in decision-making that occur because of the way that we all think. so i just w