David Kennedy is back with a new plan to fight crime.

If you've been around here, you'll remember the then Harvard criminologist came here in the 1990s as the city murders were soaring into the 300s (with a record 353 in 1993). Kennedy came amid a nasty public dispute between police and prosecutors and told them that understanding motive would help resolve cases.

Kennedy put research behind a theory that every cop knew -- that a small number of criminals were responsible for a majority of the crime. He quantified by showing that more than 75 percent of the victims had prior criminals records, as did 90 percent of the suspects. Those numbers are just as high today (at left, Baltimore Sun photographer Kim Hairston captures police investigating a shooting death on North Rosedale Street back in May).

"Even in the hardest-hit areas," Kennedy told me then. "At the street level, there is a logic and a history to almost everything that goes on. It's not immune to understanding, and is not immune from prevention."

A few years later, I went to a Comstat meeting where cops grill each other on crime and strategize. I watched as two detectives described shooting investigations and only in the conference room did they realize they were working linked attacks on virtually the same street corner. Another cop stood up and announced he knew the nickname of one of the suspects, and a third cop told the stunned group he knew the man's real name.

The police commissioner at the time, Edward T. Norris, was shocked that such basic detective work was unfolding in an office instead of on the street. That was more than a decade ago, and while we've now got homicides down to a more politically correct level, in the 200s, we're still the second deadliest city in the country and the number of people shot and killed on city streets is unacceptable.

Kennedy, who has worked with police departments all over the country and is now with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, now has added to his program to include a variant of gang call-ins (which the city has done for a while) in which local, state and federal law enforcement call in gang members, lecture them and show them how much is known about what they do. It's sort of a street-level scared-straight. Kennedy proposes offering job placement (his plan is outlined in detail in the New Yorker).

Baltimore has agreed to look at Kennedy's updated plan, much of it still based on his original Operation Cease Fire that helped Boston many years ago. We have many programs in place, from a police violent crime task force concentrating on the most murderous neighborhoods to a group of former gang members who reach out to criminals to resolve disputes before they end in gunfire, called Operation Safe Streets.

The city needs to do something, but should avoid a patch-work of programs that are synced so that everyone knows what everyone is doing. The most important part is to ensure that the most violent offenders, the ones responsible for most of the crime, are targeted by authorities from the beat cop to the probation agent to the prosecutor. Under Operation Safe Streets, such a list is kept in a war room, but we need to make sure everyone is on board.

Back when Kennedy first came, the city planned a big announcement hailing the initiative as the most comprehensive overhaul of how cops fought crime to every happen in the city. But bickering between agencies forced officials to delay the announcement; the then Maryland U.S. Attorney balked, saying she didn't want part of a plan that doomed to fail if city cops, prosecutors and others couldn't agree on a strategy.