Last week a New Orleans City Council committee approved an ordinance to pay for longer police shifts during the summer months, but it didn’t seem to consider the accountability standards for violent crime Councilwoman Shelley Midura had written about only a week prior to the meeting. In May, during another City Council meeting, New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley became angry when Midura had floated the idea of withholding police overtime until NOPD brass layout its strategies for battling violent crime.

     Maybe it’s time to look at how other cities are dealing with it. In Cincinnati, cops are using the Ceasefire method, which was developed by anthropologist David Kennedy. In its June 22 issue, The New Yorker contained a well-researched article by John Seabrook about Ceasefire’s success in Cincinnati as well as in many other American cities, and how the program uses a combination of academics, social workers, cops and former criminals to stop the violence. Here’s an abstract of the article. If you want to read the whole story, you’ll have to buy a copy of the magazine, visit your local library, or peruse the Internet for more information.