Operation Safe Streets is one of those programs copied from somewhere else that has merit but also raises questions. Mediators, many once from the street, thus giving them credibility, mediate disputes between rival drug dealers and gangs to stop them from shooting at each other.

But what happens, as did Sunday night, when one of the mediators gets shot while attending a backyard cookout targeted by a gunman who shot 12 people and once again thrust the city into a new debate over violence.

Was the victim at the party to work sources or did he know something was about to go down? And if he did know violence might break out, should he have notified his superiors and thus law enforcement? The whole  idea behind the program is to stop violence without involving the cops, which are mistrusted by suspects, victims, witnesses and just about everybody else.

That creates an uneasy relationship in that the Safe Streets advisors know a lot about what's going on but are essentially off-limits to cops and detectives trying to gather intelligence. They can't do  their jobs if they run to the cops but the cops can't do theirs if they don't have information.

So you sacrifice arrests for quiet.

It's all fine until the quiet goes away.

And then you have the city's police commissioner questioning why his cops didn't know about the cookout, held on the anniversary of the shooting deaths of two gang members. These are dates someone in the police community should be aware of. Someone at Safe Streets knew but that wasn't enough this time.

Safe Streets has been successful -- they went more than a year without a homicide in the neighborhood next to where the cookout shooting occurred, though there were several shootings within a block of the boundaries. That didn't hold into this year and now the whole place as exploded.

Can Safe Streets and the cops hold it together?