Pathways to Extremist Violence
Keynote Speaker: Park Dietz, M.D., M.P.H, Ph.D.
Over the past 40 years, Dr. Park Dietz has had an insider’s view of some of the most dangerous men and women to affect our nation’s security, conducting comprehensive forensic psychiatric evaluations of mass murderers, bombers, serial killers, and terrorists. For 30 of those years, he’s been applying his insights to prevent violence within organizations by developing early warning systems of deviant human behavior that result in prompt expert risk assessment and risk management.
In this Keynote address, Dr. Dietz will share what he’s learned of the various pathways that lead some people to acts of extreme violence in furtherance of their beliefs. In his view, the necessary and sufficient conditions for such crimes to occur are extremist belief systems, justifications for violence, imagined rewards, constricted views of alternative courses of action, and opportunity. He’ll illustrate this view with examples drawn from his evaluations of Theodore Kaczynski, Eric Rudolph, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Dylann Roof, and other offenders.