More fighting to do

Even as Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and the NYPD take a well-deserved bow for driving crime in New York City to record lows this year, upward spikes of shootings and violent crime in some inner-city neighborhoods show there’s more work to be done.

In Brooklyn’s 71st Precinct, which covers Crown Heights, murders jumped to 21, up from nine last year, the largest increase in the city. Murders also went up in Bedford-Stuyvesant and in Fordham/University Heights, the Bronx.

Resurrect the Street Crimes Unit

In the mid-1990s, the now-defunct Street Crimes Unit was a small, elite unit of specially trained officers who prowled the streets in undercover cars with the specific goal of spotting, disarming and arresting gun-toting crooks. Their early successes led to an unwise decision by then-Commissioner Howard Safir to swell the size of the unit with undertrained officers, including rookies. That blunder started the chain of events that culminated in the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, and the disbanding of the Street Crimes Unit.

The next year, murders began trending upward in central Brooklyn and elsewhere. Kelly should carefully reconstitute the anti-gun patrols, using a small number of well-trained veterans who are less likely to create another Diallo tragedy.

Get probation and parole into the act

The city and state departments of probation and parole, which are charged with supervising ex-inmates once they have left city jails and state prisons, are often ignored as key players in maintaining public safety. This is a mistake.

Probation and parole officers have regular contact with the men and women who are most likely to fall back into criminal habits – and should be based in high-crime neighborhoods, where they can work directly with churches and community organizations to help find housing and honest jobs for ex-inmates. This approach, which has been tried on an experimental basis in East New York, is endorsed by no less an authority than Rutgers University Prof. George Kelling, a former probation officer who is one of the co-authors of the 1982 article, “Broken Windows,” which laid out the crime-fighting strategy later followed by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Make a federal case out of illegal guns

Every time an unlicensed gun is used in a violent crime, city and federal prosecutors should launch a probe of how the firearm got here – and indict the entire chain of sellers and buyers who transported and laundered the gun from its legal start at a factory into the black market of the streets. Nationwide, 1.2% of the gun dealers supply 57% of the guns used in crimes, and a recent study traced more than 30,000 crime guns to just 137 dealers.

Prosecutors ought to put money, manpower and investigative muscle into busting the relatively small number of straw buyers and gun-launderers in places like Virginia, Florida and Georgia, along with their New York accomplices, who are flooding our city with deadly weapons.