A WAR ZONE

Attack Systemic Causes of Last Week's Shocking Violence

For far too many children in Rochester, a homicide in the
neighborhood is no longer shocking. Many who live in the most violent
areas of the city have grown numb even to shootings in broad daylight.

Community leaders must do more to give them back their
innocence.

Between Sunday and Thursday of last week, at least one person per day
died violently in this city. Police Chief David Moore is responding
by putting 36 more officers on the streets to aggressively search for
illegal guns and crack down on illegal drug markets. That should at
least help city residents feel safer.

The city, county and state must also find a way to expand Operation
Impact, a program that brought in around 40 state troopers and
sheriff's deputies to help patrol Rochester in the late summer. For
the three months that this program was in effect, the homicide rate
dropped precipitously. That's a sign that more resources can help cut
violence over the short term.

This page has said it before, and will say it again: The city cannot
depend exclusively on the police to solve this problem. If young men,
and sometimes women, are roaming the streets, prepared to take lives
with illegal guns, it too often means that parents have failed. So
have the school system, churches, the economy and society at large.

When Mayor Duffy was the city's police chief, he stressed the
importance of attacking the root causes of crime. Now that Duffy is
mayor, it's good that he is trying to get businesses to provide jobs
for city youths through the city's Summer of Opportunity program.
It's critical to provide young people with employment opportunities
beyond the drug trade, which results in so much street violence.

It's also important for the community to keep exploring outgoing
school Superintendent Manuel Rivera's Children's Zone concept, which
would unite social service agencies to address the societal ills that
make it difficult for children to achieve in school.

In eight of the past 11 years, Rochester has had the highest per-
capita murder rate of any city in New York.

The community can and must do better.