In 2021, Moose Jaw had a crime severity index of 127.18, up from 104.28 in 2020 and 110.35 in 2019. For 2021, among communities with over 10k people, Moose Jaw placed 37th on 325.
The report, by Statistics Canada, also showed that Saskatchewan had the highest crime rates among provinces in Canada in 2021, with a 3% jump from 2020, in violent and non-violent offenses.
Though the 2,434 drug offenses, with ecstasy, cocaine, opioids, methamphetamine, marijuana, heroin and others dipped 7% in 2021 from 2020, the question is — what are the mental health and drug abuse components of crime?
There was a recent horrific attack by two suspects in Saskatchewan that left 10 dead and 18 injured.
An angle for Saskatchewan towards public safety, harm reduction and crime prevention is — what gaps in mental health or stretches of drug influences could be responsible for those spikes?
How does the memory play violence, hate or the hardened decision to cause pain? In what ways would a potential perpetrator find help with pervasive mental care, before devolving into dark states or becoming vulnerable to belonging with bad gangs?
How would the affected and their loved ones find faster balance from the trauma, depression, anxiety and intrusive thoughts that follow?
Brain science holds the cards for new understanding and approaches to mental health and drug abuse against crime in Saskatchewan. The brain is the driver of experiences. Thought and memory are decision makers of the states of mind.
How can this reduction be made for how care is scaled, digitally, across demography?
What is the role of thought in what instigates the decision to commit a crime? How are the fears of apprehension or consequences circumvented, in memory, for random violence?
Thoughts, conceptually, are the versions, representations, or equivalents of the external world — meaning, the external world exists in the brain in the forms of thought. It is this version of the world that goes across locations in the brain, for what to know, how to feel and react to situations.
The object, situation and so on, are experiences to the brain in the form of thought. Dreams, imaginations, inner voice, thinking, language, music, words, memories and others are all in the form of thought.
In neuroscience, all sensory inputs or stimuli arrive for processing or integration in the thalamus, except for smell processed in the olfactory bulb—thereafter relayed to the cerebral cortex for interpretation.
Sensory processing or integration is theorized to be into thought or its form. This means that when external sensations arrive in the brain, they do so at relay or landing centres where they are processed into a uniform unit or quantity, which is thought — emerging as the new identity of senses.
It is thought that gets accepted or admitted for interpretation — propounded as knowing, feeling and reaction.
Knowing is memory. The memory stores thought or its form. There are two types of stores in memory, micro and macro. Micro contains the smallest possible unique information on anything in the smallest possible unit, while macro collects similarities between two or more micros.
This means that since different sets of objects are known, they are respectively grouped based on similarities or commonness to reduce repetitions or cluttering against neural efficiency.
During activities and interactions, micro stores are constantly transporting to macro for what to remember, feel-like, understand, and so on. Sequences of relay by micro stores also matter in memory, not just the macro locations.
There are early-splits or go-before of micro stores during activities, following a previously established sequence. This early-split is what makes it possible to listen to someone, see something or infer what is next, as expected.
It is often called predictions, as in predictive coding and predictive processing but principally rules of the memory.
Sequences are also responsible for familiarity with things, even when details are not remembered, because the micro store travels the same route to macro stores.
For example, watching or listening to an old video or audio, or going to a childhood residential area or reading an old book and so on, knowing but not remembering could be a function of sequence.
Sequence is also used to remember, while thinking. Forgotten sequence could make recalling tougher. Sequence makes somethings sound cliché. Sequence also makes doing the same thing again and again tiring, boring or uninteresting.
People seek new experiences for new sequences of micro to macro stores in memory. Each neuron has thousands of synapses which, theoretically, could also mean different sequences, of constructs of thought forms and memory.
The macro store has a principal spot where just one goes to have a dominant influence. It is where depression, anxiety and others — as macro stores — go, to cause the most problems.
There are feelings destinations following memory stores, where actual feelings are [aside the feel-like in memory] then reaction to feelings, which could be parallel or perpendicular.
There is no experience, decision or action beyond thought and memory.
Displaying their locations and destinations in the mind to explain experiences, available on mobile phones in Saskatchewan, or say Saskscare, could be a see-it-for-yourself approach to democratize what is in the head to have more control.
It could also be useful to reach vulnerable groups as part of community programs, as well as to discourage drug abuse for users by seeking out matching experiences — for corresponding changes to thought and memory — without the harmful substance.
A new mental health aptitude could be the thought and memory function of situations and conditions — where, for therapy, the function is also measured and applied, depending on limits and extents of both.
The future of crime prevention seems to be aligned with brain science, which is now a hyper prioritized situation for rights to safety and freedoms across Saskatchewan and the rest of Canada.
The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Moose Jaw Today, the Moose Jaw Express, its management, or its subsidiaries.
