Violent Criminal Actors - Introduction

Today I'm joined by William April. And quite honestly, he is one of the foremost experts in the country on the concept of the Violent Criminal Actor. Who are these people that we're preparing to defend ourselves, our family and maybe our other community members against? William, I really appreciate you being here. No, happy to be here Robert.

That's a little bit of a stretch, I wouldn't say foremost expert. You're here in that chair because I wanted you to tell people what you've learned about Violent Criminal Actors. And I've heard you give presentations at conferences and speak on this topic as much as I've heard anybody else who speaks of this topic. I've heard you and the things that you say make sense and I know that, well, why don't you talk a little bit about the background of how you come to this knowledge and where this information of Violent Criminal Actors comes from? Well, I started out thinking I'd have a career in law enforcement and after a little bit of college I was a Sheriff's deputy working in corrections in courts and on patrol.

And then I worked for the U.S. Marshall service in the Eastern District of Louisiana, decided that wasn't going to be a career for me and went back to school and then onto graduate school and have been in the behavioral sciences ever since. And having the ability to work both in a court setting meaning in and around criminals and work in mental health setting, the paths kept overlapping and it just seemed more and more I would find myself in those positions. There's a tremendous amount of mental health work being done in legal systems and the tremendous amount of mental health difficulty finds itself into court sooner or later and so there's a great amount of overlap and a great place for me to work first and study later. I know that that background has informed a lot of what you do and you do many different things, you cover a lot of different pieces of information that are important to personal defense but specifically to the violence aspect because there's certainly plenty of people in the mental health system that aren't inherently violent; just like people been walking around every day.

Everyone may have some potential for violence but this Violent Criminal Actor concept, how do you come to focusing so much on them and really gain insight that most of us don't have? It's funny you're the first person to actually pick up on that because I think the Violent Criminal Actor doesn't really fall most appropriately under a mental health heading at all. There are certainly a great many of them carry a mental health diagnosis but it's not particularly amenable to treatment, some of it isn't amenable to treatment at all. And you will run into quite a few theorists who say that it's not an illness of any kind but rather a difference in the structure of the brain, a difference in the structure of the mind. And that's not to remove responsibility from somebody doing criminal acts but that they're so predisposed and that it's almost a different category of being as opposed to a "normal" person with an illness.

And the courts don't really know what to do with them either because in a lot of cases traditional punishments don't seem to have any weight at all and that can make them seem too crazy for the courts but too legally sane for, you know, for the mental health system. Well, it's definitely something I know that you struggle with on that side of your profession. In terms of helping anyone, myself included, learn more about the mindset, for lack of a better term, and the behaviors and the habits of the Violent Criminal Actor. I think your presentations are spot on so I'm really looking forward to this information. But one thing, just to go back to one thing you said, I think it's very important.

The vast majority of the mentally ill are not a danger to anyone except themselves. You know the most common mentally ill person that your average viewer will come in contact with is a homeless person with schizophrenia or mood disorder. And they're of no danger to anyone but themselves and that is mostly through their inability to self care. But we're talking about a very narrow subset folks that can be very, very dangerous and everyone both the courts and the mental health system struggles to categorize them and struggles to figure out what to do with them. Well I think your category, your title of Violent Criminal Actor seems very appropriate and as we learn more about what that title entails perhaps it'll help you to be prepared better for your worst case scenario of personal defense.