It has been hard to cope with the news of the past week: a 36-year-old mother beaten and stabbed to death as a crowd looked on. A 49-year-old man, known for his community service, shot dead as he walked back from a neighborhood meeting.

There's the sense that this city is just being beaten down. And you can understand the mayor's anger as he insists that the city will spare no expense to stop this madness.

The mayor and the police chief have announced a more "aggressive" law-enforcement effort. More police, more searches, more arrests. Officers will clear corners, rigorously enforce the youth curfew, rigorously enforce littering and loitering regulations.

Will this help?

Sure, short term, and obviously short term is important. Too many people are walking around with guns in Rochester's inner-city neighborhoods. In the first 24 hours after the new push was announced, police arrested two young men carrying guns. One, according to police, had been on his way - with a shotgun - to settle things with somebody who threatened him earlier.

It's not a reach to assume that with that arrest, police prevented another murder.

In their sweeps and stops and searches, police will be questioning a lot of people, and if they have guns they're not supposed to have, they'll be arrested. The experience of some cities is that the word spreads, fewer people carry guns, and violent crime drops.

This is no small thing. RIT criminal-justice professor John Klofas, who works part-time for the Duffy administration, says he is seeing a substantial number of what he calls "opportunistic robberies": robberies committed by people who are carrying a gun and happen across someone who appears vulnerable.

As best we know, James Slater was simply returning home from an evening meeting and had the tragic luck of encountering somebody with a gun. Police theorize that it was an attempted robbery.

During the summer, a similar encounter took the life of a young musician.

Nobody should think that the police can solve Rochester's violence problem, though. For starters, this will be expensive. It will involve lots of overtime, and the police department is already coping with a big overtime budget.

And beyond that, aggressive policing does nothing to address the roots of Rochester's violence problem: gun traffic and, deeper still, poverty and joblessness.

High-profile crimeslike the murders of Latasha Shaw and James Slater generate public outrage, and rightly so. But we do need to keep things in perspective. For one thing, while Rochester's rate of violent crime is far too high, it is actually lower than last year's. That by no means diminishes the tragedy of the victims' deaths, but we shouldn't respond irrationally.

And not all violent crimes are the same. Most involve a conflict between people who know each other. Violent crimes committed by a stranger are rare. We remember those crimes precisely because they are so rare. And Klofas says he is seeing nothing in this year's crime reports that indicate a new trend.

What should we be doing?

We need to have the mayor flesh out a few things. It makes me nervous to hear public officials talk about "aggressive" policing without defining what that means. Have city and police officials clearly defined their expectations - and their limits? Have police been adequately trained for this new aggressiveness?

If police start to "clear a corner" of young black men and two of them run, are police supposed to follow? If one makes a move as if he's pulling a gun, what do we expect the officers to do?

This community has had some tragic experience with civilians being shot by police during confrontations. It doesn't help things to put police and residents at risk in the name of "aggressiveness."

And is anybody keeping an eye on the Constitution?

Beyond the policing, we need an aggressive, community-wide, violence-prevention effort targeting the young people in these neighborhoods. Reports are that Latasha Shaw was responding to a call from a 14-year-old daughter involved in a large fight - and that the same young people had been involved in an earlier fight.

How long had this hostility been brewing? Had no teacher, youth worker, or police officer seen any problems among these children previously? Did no parent realize the seriousness of this conflict? Had no one seen indications of violence? If they had, did they do anything? Did a teacher or youth worker talk to parents? Do teachers and service-agency people talk to each other? Do they meet regularly with police to exchange concerns?

What kind of intervention should there be? What kind of help would be effective?

The curfew was supposed to identify families in trouble and get help for them, but that part of the program has been slow getting off the ground. Will that change now?

And for the long term: We need a pledge by community leaders that they will address the roots of the problem.

We won't stop the violence until we get serious about tackling the poverty and the joblessness. That will take an effort unprecedented in the history of this community. And, sadly, it will take an effort that's completely uncharacteristic of this community's leaders.

Klofas referred me to a couple of articles by University of Illinois Professor John Hagedorn, who argues that the cities that have reduced violence are those that have improved their economy - those that have grown jobs.

Joblessness, Hagedorn insists, breeds despair. People with little hope of a decent job turn to other things: drug sales, robbery. "If people don't have hope," he writes, "they become desperate and willing to do things they may not have before. Their children feed off of that desperation and follow in their footsteps."

And, he writes, location matters: communities must make sure that new jobs aren't all located in wealthier areas, that they are created in central cities and spill over into poorer neighborhoods.

Hagedorn was talking specifically about the creation of high-tech, "new economy" jobs. The manufacturing companies we once relied on for low-skill jobs are gone, he says, and they won't be back.

Yes, many of the new-economy jobs require a college education. But many don't. And job growth creates other jobs. Not all of the pain Rochester has felt from Kodak's downsizing comes from the loss of the Kodak jobs themselves. Kodak employees bought goods that were supplied by stores and companies that employed a variety of labor types. If Rochester were to grow its technical employment base, and if local universities and medical centers continue to expand, that will create jobs not only at those centers but well beyond.

That's the path we seem headed down now, albeit slowly. The challenge is to ramp up that growth.

The challenge is also to make sure that we are training inner-city young people for the jobs that exist today and that will exist tomorrow. That will have to involve more than the Rochester school district. It will have to involve employers and unions.

And the challenge is to make sure that the low-skill jobs don't get outsourced to India, and to make sure that those jobs - all of those jobs - pay a decent wage. Low-wage jobs will not lift families out of poverty. And it is poverty that we have to address.

No, job creation won't be easy; we've been working on it for years. But there are beginning to be signs of hope.

The challenge is to make sure that the young people in the inner city benefit from it.

And no, creating jobs won't immediately overcome the effects of years of concentrated poverty, joblessness, poor education, teen pregnancy, and family dissolution.

But lack of jobs guarantees the perpetuation of all of that. And it guarantees that the violence will continue.

If I were Mayor Duffy, who clearly understands the relationship between poverty and crime, I would get the presidents of the universities, the heads of the trade unions, the business leaders, school-district leaders, neighborhood leaders, and church leaders together - not to study the problem, but to act. We know what the problem is. And we know what the solutions are.

The violence that took the lives of Latasha Shaw and James Slater got the public's attention last week. But the vigils will end, and our attention will move on to something else. Until the next killing of a mother and a community worker. Until the next murder of someone who seems a bit more like us and less like the tough youths in the inner city.

All of the deaths are tragic. The loss of hope in the inner city is tragic. The loss of the potential of the city's young people is tragic.

How serious are we about putting an end to all that? How "aggressive" are we willing to be?

City's online archive has an extensive interview with Klofas on the roots of Rochester's high murder rate. Access: "Rochester: Made for Murder" and "What Options for a City Made for Murder."