By David Stephen
Sedona, Az —Summary: It is common to seek motives during crime investigations. Sometimes, motives are clear, other times they are not. However, motives or intention to commit crimes may not always apply to crime prevention at scale since there are several similar or obvious motives to similar crimes. The article explores the human mind, with consequences as a memory, where crime can also be investigated for the reasons consequences were forgotten or ignored, so that warnings to prevent similar crimes may include what to avoid, if consequences of breaking the law must not be forgotten.
There is a recent story on AZFamily, Phoenix Police guide businesses with crime prevention using program, stating that, “The Phoenix Police Department is trying to help businesses cut down on crime. They’re using a new crime prevention program called “Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design” or CPTED. It’s a voluntary program that the City’s community action department uses to help businesses prevent criminal activity. The program can include some common-sense measures including access, lighting, landscaping and surveillance.”
The law often adopts adjustments from brain science, where intent, spontaneity, tally and status of mind [disturbance or under substance], are factored in deciding penalty. However, in prevention of crime, how much does seeking out a motive matter, if the ways that motive works in the human mind are not clearly established.
What matters more to preventing crimes? Consequences for actions, isolating an extreme ideology, seeking intent or a match with prior motives? Motive for any crime could be an ideology. It could be hate, hurt, an outcome of a craving, vengeance, thrill prediction, rejection, disappointment, a disgruntled state and so on. Motive, which has dominated investigations in the past, may not be the most important question to understand and prevent crimes this century.
A question—predicated on the mechanisms of the human mind—that should follow any crime is this, how did this suspect forget or ignore the consequences for this act?
For people living with serious mental illnesses, it is probably easy to identify that the memory of decision and consequences might be unavailable, but with others, why is the memory of consequences not taken more seriously than motive, towards crime prevention?
Consequences for crimes include those that are punishable by law and those that could estrange the individual from loved ones, or loved ones from society. Consequences also work because there are several unpleasant states of mind where consequences in reality may bring, making self-experience potent for good behavior.
Consequences, aside from crimes, can be said to be a factor of nature. There are consequences to actions, made by the laws of physics. Hot is hot. Cold is cold. Time continues. Altitude is real. Distance takes energy. Water must be used within bounds, and several others.
Education in consequences from childhood—or nurture—is almost more important to survival than education for literacy and numeracy. Consequences are memory that must not be forgotten, even if people, places, things, subjects or experiences are forgotten.
Consequences for crimes are parallel with the consequences of nature. Some consequences are mild, but affect is often telling. Some are extreme, such that—with others as casualty—there is the same certainty for the self, without caution.
How does anyone, without mind problems or under influence, forget or ignore consequences? How could consequences, that are sometimes catastrophic, be forgotten or ignored? Some suspects rely on sophisticated planning, yet there are many aspects of consequences that may still be ignored, so how come?
This could be a major neuroscience research for crime prevention this decade, in what would do better than seeking motives. Large language models [LLMs] may help set reminders in vulnerable demography, but consequences must be honed, in ways that are personalized, detailed and expressive of simulated outcomes, beyond what parents, guardians or others may alert.
The Human Mind
The human mind is theorized to be the collection of all the electrical and chemical signals with their interactions and features, in sets, in clusters of neurons, across the central and peripheral nervous systems.
The key functions or divisions of the human mind are postulated to be a result of the interactions of the signals, resulting in memory, feelings, emotions and modulation of internal senses. Subdivisions include delight, pain, hurt, craving, ideology, intelligence, reasoning, planning, hate, love, cold, heat, worry, anxiety, consequences and so forth.
Features are grades or qualifications of functions, to bring them to use, or shape how they function. They include attention, awareness, self or subjectivity and intentionality, control or free will.
Features are postulated to be mostly mechanized within the same sets of signals for functions. Though these labels align with experiences, the mechanism of the human mind involves sets of signals, and how they work, primarily. Functions and features are near universal. However, their relays, incipience, halts and intervals diverge widely, among minds.
Consequences
How do sets of electrical signals relay consequences? How are consequences configured by sets of chemical signals? How are consequences arrayed across sets of signals? How does intentionality grade or qualify consequences? How can this concept be displayed, using LLMs, to people who might be at risk of crimes, to ensure that how the mind may set up the action is seen, and then when vulnerable, is prevented?
The future of crime prevention includes the architecture for how consequences are forgotten or ignored, to ensure that society is safer, not simply seeking the situational motive of every crime.
Crime Prevention
Instructions could be, avoid this, so that the relays on one’s mind [electrical signals] would not go towards destinations for pleasure or something else, while ignoring consequences for actions. This would use probabilities to display likelihoods, such that when an individual finds the self in some situation or mind state, it is possible to calculate proximity to committing a crime, then to hold back intentionally or leave.