It's a bit of a reduction that construes offenders as alien to the rest of humanity (they're incapable of empathy), promoting a dangerous sense of immunity to the problem (I have empathy, so I'm not capable of these offenses). Seems self-serving. Better social psychologists have come along, performed revealing studies, and identified general susceptibilities in humanity to conformity, authority, diffusion of responsibility, & moral disengagement that show the problem is more relatable to humanity in general. Historical record consistently shows people's capacity for cruelty & inhumanity isn't exceptional.

The truth is we may be far more similar to people who commit atrocities than we'd like to think. It's hard to predict how someone will do unless they've actually been tested.

Emotions can & often are bent to irrational, unjust ends: empathy alone won't reliably save us from succumbing to irrationality & far worse. People also need reason & integrity to withstand challenges. These may be more important than empathy: I've seen far more emotional, irrational people being unjust than people with reason & integrity on their side.

It might be important to ask what causes people to lack empathy. Currently there seems to be a rather unscientific line of thought at least in social media that some people are just intrinsically evil.

Wow, this is so true. Keep in mind there's technically no such thing as cold. Or dark. What we call that is simply the measure of the absence of warmth or light. I think the same thing applies to empathy...

What would you call someone who commits a horrible crime, feels bad about it and does it again?

This is just me speaking from a contemporary point of view. Maybe part of the equation is a struggle to have a comfortable life and then seeing a limited sample of others who are better off whether through a combination of hard work and good luck, or see some people gaming the system with impunity. A lot of arguments I hear about those sympathetic to conservative talking points often have anecdotal experiences of seeing people abuse welfare or allegedly not pay taxes because they're undocumented workers.

"Why should I support those illegals when my tax dollars go to help them when they don't pay tax themselves?"

"I've seen people who can't speak English buy steak and lobster with food stamps."

This resentment can then grow from continuous exposure to biased media portraying some bad actors burning or looting in protests. At that point it doesn't matter what actually caused the protests, because they've generalized all those people to be thugs undeserving of being listened to. After that, minorities are seen as a nuisance that must be rid of at all costs. It doesn't matter if they're documented or not, they must be bad because the police are arresting and hurting them.

I don't have a good way to defuse their anger. They are right that some people in the minority act like criminals. They don't want to separate the good from the bad and just want to get rid of everyone whom the media and those in their echo chamber say are causing trouble.

recently it was discussed that autistic people also struggle with empathy.