Less than two months ago, this newspaper discussed violent crime in the wake of weekend of death and shootings.

Just this month, the death toll has grown.

This week, Minister Louis Farrakhan discussed some of the possible causes of violent crime, especially involving the youth.

And many of the problems he highlighted, especially in education and the pervasive violence of the popular media, were accurate.

This newspaper said in May that the time had come for the community to put its differences aside and to pull together to tackle the problem.

That has not happened yet, at least not to any appreciable extent.

We said then the Police must be given the tools they need to detect these kinds of crimes and to properly and safely police areas where shootings, drug dealing and the like are likely to take place.

We said there needed to be a genuine crackdown on guns and gun crime and a much more intensive approach to preventing the shipment of drugs and guns through the Island's ports of entry.

Thes efforts do not seem to be happening.

We also noted that crime detection, prosecution and convictions are only part of the solution, and have in fact been reasonably successful in the last year or more.

The community has a wider responsibility to look at the causes of crime and gang violence.

One area this newspaper talked about was a serious review of the so-called war on drugs.

Another is to tackle the gang problem head on. A recent article in the New Yorker magazine recently discussed a controversial approach to stopping gang crime called "Ceasefire" pioneered by a professor called David Kennedy.

In the programme, Police identify gang members who are on parole or probation and compel them to attend a meeting. There, the cops would demand that the shootings end, and promise that, if they did not, the punishment would be swift and severe and target the entire gang. The city would also make life coaching and job counseling available to those who wanted out of the thug life.

This approach is not perfect, although it has had success in Boston, High Point, North Carolina and Cincinnati, the focus of the article.

In some ways, it echoes the efforts of former Comissioner Jean-Jacques Lemay to get gangs to talk to each other and of the Mirrors programme, which has had some success in the community with disaffected youth.

But in dealing directly with gangs, who, according to Minister Louis Farrakhan and others, are keen to break the current cycle of violence but don't know how to, there is a chance to end the violence and get young people in gangs back on track.

As Assistant Police Commissioner Paul Wright noted in yesterday's newspaper, the number of people responsible for most crimes is relatively small and it was also good to see the Police continuing to expand their crime intelligence efforts.

When they are young and in gangs that can be broken up, then the strategy can be doubly successful.

But Ceasefire, Mirrors and any other approach that is proposed, will fail unless the community gets behind it and continues to work to prevent c rime and to report it when it is witnessed.