To proponents of this choice, the other two choices commit the classic error of treating symptoms while allowing root causes to go unaddressed.

The reason Philadelphians don’t feel safe, in this view, is that they live in a city where one can see in high relief the harshness of an American society that kills hope for many people and pushes them toward crime to meet basic needs.

In this view, mandatory sentences or high-tech police equipment amount to so much shuffling of deck chairs on the Titanic until government gets serious about providing people with the supports they need to be law-abiding. City youth turn to crime, in this view, because they lack educational, job and recreational opportunities. Media stereotyping reinforces those barriers, and practically invites youths to confirm negative expectations. The easy availability of guns and the profitable lure of the illegal gun trade too often clinch the deal.

In this view, many first-time offenders become repeat offenders because of a lack of other resources: job training, drug rehab and mental health programs.

To this choice, only a superficial approach would complain that attacking these problems at the root is too expensive. Proponents of this choice quote that auto-parts commercial: You can pay me now, or you can pay me later. In other words, the long-term costs of forcing police, courts, prisons, the health system and the welfare system deal with the ripple effects of crime far outstrip the costs of investing as needed in education, recreation, job training, police training and gun control.

One of those costs, in this view, is the threat that unleashing the police and courts to fight crime by any means would pose to constitutional rights, particularly those of minorities.

• Invest more in education and job training for city youth.

• Develop more after-school, mentoring and recreation programs. (Midnight basketball, yes!)

• Teach students conflict resolution from an early age.

• End sensational media stereotypes about poor and minority youths.

• Expand effective drug rehab and mental health programs.

• Focus prison resources on education, drug treatment and job training.

• Create better programs to ease the re-entry of ex-convicts into society.

• End residency rules and expand recruitment to bring a better-educated, more sophisticated kind of police officer to the city.

• Show zero tolerance for police corruption and brutality. If department leaders can’t do that, set up a citizen review process that will.

• Fund legal-defense and civil liberties groups to monitor police, courts and prisons aggressively for violations of individual rights.

• Merit selection of judges.

• Strict gun control laws, including a ban on handgun sales.

• Sue gun manufacturers for the civic cost of gun violence.

• Consider decriminalization of drugs.

• Crime is a symptom of societal injustice.

• The "tough on crime" approach has been tried repeatedly and failed, at great cost to the city budget and to civil liberties.

• The military metaphor behind the "war on crime" and the "war on drugs" leads to muddled, unproductive tactics. Gun violence and drugs are public health problems that need to be addressed with clarity about the root social causes.

• Attacking the demand side of the drug trade - through education, drug rehab and the creation of economic hope in inner-city areas - will be far more effective than doing Sisyphean battle with the suppliers. Cutting drug use will curb other forms of drug-related crime.

• Nothing erodes the rule of law and the public sense of safety more than lawlessness by the police. Minority communities in particular cannot feel safe if the police are not held to the highest standards of behavior.

• The most common problem with judges is not that they are lenient, but that they see themselves as allies of the police and prosecutors, in violation of due process.

• Individuals are responsible for their actions. Nothing encourages crime like saying that it’s the fault of society, not criminals.

• While all these expensive social solutions are taking effect, what are we supposed to do about the crimes that will continue to occur?

• People don’t turn to crime because they don’t have a job; they turn to crime because they lack values. We tried the welfare state already, and it produced the breakdown of the family and of respect for law that we see now.

• This focus on individual rights clouds the proper role of the community in setting standards for public behavior and helping the police to enforce them.

• Treating police as the enemy never made a community safer. Respect for rights grows out of trust and partnership, not court rulings.

• Decriminalizing drugs would be the final stage in this society’s collapse of values.

Social justice. Prevention. Healing. Individual rights. Collective responsibility.