TIME FOR ACTION AGAINST KILLINGS

Cincinnati council members have proven they can feud for days over how to
knock down the city's homicide rate. They can whine that their proposals
aren't given proper respect, and vow an almost desperate willingness to try
something new, but when do we get specifics?

Vice Mayor Alicia Reece plans to push for reinstatement of the police
department's gang unit, which Police Chief Tom Streicher says he disbanded
because it wasn't as effective as the current intelligence unit now
handling such cases. Where's the evidence the city's 75 homicides in 2003,
a 25-year high, were committed by gangs? Let's hear why Ms. Reece thinks
the gangs unit can do better, and why the chief prefers the intelligence unit.

Let's also get beyond council recriminations that sound increasingly like
high school. With all due respect to council members, this is not about
you, and it's not about how much money the city should devote to it. It's
about people getting shot up in neighborhoods.

It may not be about gangs, but it is certainly about illegal drugs.
Streicher has said at least 90 percent of the killings are related to
drugs. What can council do to help police and decent people in the
neighborhoods crack down on drug thugs and illegal drug users? What can
council do to persuade intimidated residents to inform and testify against
violent criminals?

Some council members are pushing for a new grassroots task force to end the
violence and find jobs. A task force of law enforcement, ministers groups,
residents and civic volunteers may be a good idea, but tell us why we need
another framework when this city spent a year developing the 2002
collaborative agreements for such things. They required a renewed
partnership between police and residents designed to take on just such
intolerable conditions as open-air illegal drug markets and gunmen
terrorizing inner-city neighborhoods. They gave it the jawbreaking name of
Community Problem Oriented Policing, but it's no abstraction. Mostly CPOP
means friendly beat cops joining with residents willing to act, especially
to protect or salvage each other's children.

Do we have enough cops walking beats day and night in neighborhoods
infested with drug dealers and gunmen? Did the ministers mobilize their
people? Did neighborhood councils recruit Citizens on Patrol? In some
districts, yes, but the body count says: Not enough. Community Problem
Oriented Policing hasn't failed. More likely, in many places, it hasn't
been tried.

University of Cincinnati Criminal Justice Professor John Paul Wright
recommends a domestic equivalent of the U.S. military's hunt for Saddam
Hussein's terrorist henchmen. Wright would have police not only sweep crime
hot-spots for people carrying guns and crack down on probation violators
and repeat violent offenders, but he urges, after a homicide arrest, we
should turn each killer's life inside out and go after his network of
criminal associates.

We have plenty of frameworks, and too much rhetoric. What we need is more
action.