BY JOHN KLOFAS

Will crime in Rochester be better or worse 25 years from now? Considering crime's impact on so much else -neighborhood stability, development, the costs of the criminal justice system - the question is important.

The best predictions usually start by looking backwards. With crime, we could consider what has been, look for other relevant data, add a little conjecture about poverty - growing or declining - maybe include something about education, and now, to acknowledge a new era of optimism, throw in a dash of Obama. It would be an easy way out.

But a jumble of facts, as accessible as they are today, probably won't help predict the future and certainly won't help create a desirable version of it. Knowing the numbers does not ensure that we will discover meaning in them.

Perhaps a better starting point is to wonder what matters about crime and violence in the first place: now or in the future. After decades of averaging 50 murders a year in Rochester, would 60 or 70 matter? To whom? Would 40 or 20 feel different?

For most people in the metro area, including much of the city, real crime is no more significant than the latest portrayal on "Law and Order." Each year the numbers feel like new facts, but will they help us understand life or death for young black men living in Rochester's poorest neighborhoods - where the murder risk is 60 times my own? Will they help us understand another family's loss to imprisonment?

Crime's statistics can just as easily obfuscate as illuminate. Counting alone keeps us focused on the act itself, a tree rather than the forest. Caricatures come easily: dope fiend, habitual offender, gangster. For 25 years, we've found comfort in our monsters. They protect us from more complex questions of cause or responsibility. How does one go from the innocence of childhood to premeditating killer?

Counting shapes our view of crime victims in much the same way. They suffer alone, with nothing but our sympathy to comfort them. We ignore their all-too-common characteristics: the fact that many of the victims of violence as well as their assailants are young minority men from what has become known as the Crescent. There, even those not directly touched by violence cannot escape its pervasive influence or the impact of the police and criminal justice system's response to it.

In choosing not to see what victims - and what victims and perpetrators and their neighbors - have in common, we risk denying whole communities a political voice. It's easy to see calls to "Stop Snitchin," for example, as evidence of fear and isolation, but could they instead be claims of solidarity and community? The shared and overlapping experiences of crime, victimization, and criminal justice are rarely acknowledged, even when racial differences in attitudes toward criminal justice are clear.

Perhaps in the next 25 years, counting crimes will be a less consuming enterprise. That could free us from what may be the most harmful impact of our numeracy: inattention to things we don't count. While we tally crimes and victims, we have no measures of the sort of outcomes we should really seek from criminal justice: community, democracy, dignity, or justice. Measure those, and we might see the world differently. We might seek a place in which communities can grow in strength and capacity, where strategy and tactics are the purview of neighborhoods rather than agencies, and where justice is not brought to neighborhoods but emerges from them. We might choose to live in a place where crime is seen as just one problem, albeit a serious one, to be addressed by communities rather than suppressed in them by others.

That is a long way from our current vision of crime and justice. Getting there could make for an uncomfortable ride. We would need to face, and abandon, our apparent preference for the techno-professional, imposing-order-from-outside model of policing, prosecution, and corrections. We would need to wean ourselves of its comforts, and we would need to stop the simultaneous embrace and rejection of those we ask to practice it.

But perhaps we are not so far off. We now know of the dangers of lead poisoning and its link to violence. That knowledge has, arguably, compelled a community to action - action that can lower crime. Could social factors be as toxic as a chip of paint? Certainly there is no discounting the effects of poverty, unemployment, or inadequate schools. Can those compel us all to action rather than simply disqualify their victims from control over their lives? Compared with our current approach, one can imagine a vision of community so different that the idea itself would lower crime.

It seems unlikely that moral arguments will move us toward a new vision over the next 25 years. The past 25 seem proof of that. The impetus too is not likely to come from leadership. Leadership will always favor something more concrete: a new surveillance technology or a program specifically intended to reduce homicide.

If a new vision is to find support, it is likely to grow out of the very forces that have misdirected us: our compulsion to count, and, of course, the growing recognition that despite broad and expensive efforts, the numbers rarely change.

John Klofas is chair of the Department of Criminal Justice at RIT, where he has served on the faculty for 20 years. He also works closely with the City of Rochester and its police department. And he directs the Center for Public Safety Initiatives at RIT - a partnership between the university and the City of Rochester and the local criminal-justice system - which is committed to the use of data to understand and address community problems. He grew up in the industrial town of Chicopee, Massachusetts.