How’s this for a cliché conversation starter in Post-Katrina New Orleans:”They really need to do something about the crime.”

Trouble is, I disagree.

I don’t disagree with the statement, but the sentiment is all wrong.

True, crime is out of control in our punch-drunk city. The recently released FBI statistics show New Orleans leads the nation with 209 murders in 2007. We killed each other at a nation-leading rate of 71 people for every 100,000 people who live here. So, there is no doubt we have a crime problem.

But the problem is, when we say “they” need to do something, we pass responsibility to some other nebulous group, usually either the police or the school system.

Speaking as a former crime reporter for the daily newspaper in Daytona Beach, Fla., I can tell you that there is only so much the police can do to bring crime, especially premeditated crime, under control. No amount of patrolling, investigating or arresting will prevent someone from killing someone else.

Sure, the police could be doing more than they are, and our courts could improve on their moribund record, but even in a best-case scenario of every homicide ending in an arrest, our problems wouldn’t be solved. For every person sent to jail, two more would emerge to take his place on the streets.

Blaming the education system is similarly flawed.

By most measures, our public schools could be doing much more than they are, but even the best-equipped school filled with the nation’s top teachers won’t solve what ails New Orleans – not when the students in that beautiful building are dodging bullets on their way home, and, in the best cases, trying to do homework in a cramped FEMA trailer.

No, there isn’t a single solution that will fix our city, but unfortunately most people who live here pick their favorite problem and say that single issue is what is holding us back.

But to ascribe the entire city’s failure onto any one problem leads us into the trap that 20th century psychologist Abraham Maslow had in mind when he said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

We are facing a profound failure of nearly every social system meant to serve our city’s poorest residents. Singling out any single problem as “the” problem plaguing the city leads to parochial solutions. Everyone wants their problem addressed, even at the expense of other worthy causes. To paraphrase another great thinker – Tyler Durden, the main character from “Fight Club” – taking a decentralized approach to the city’s problems leaves us “polishing the brass on the Titanic.” We are taking care of the little things while the ship is going down.

And while it would be great to say Katrina dealt our social systems the deathblow, the truth is, our social services were rotting from the inside long before the storm surge rolled down Canal Street.

We need to completely retool the services we provide. Before we hire more police, we need to ask why people are pulling the trigger. The bottom line is that drug gangs are jockeying for position in neighborhoods that no longer have clearly defined borders. But again, that isn’t a cause. That is another symptom.

So, again, let us take a step back. What breeds the drug gangs? What makes the high-risk life of dealing crack so appealing that an entire generation of young men shed their schooling and embark on a life that will statistically end decades before it should?

My opinion: hopelessness. Hopelessness that another similarly lucrative way to make a living will be waiting with a high school diploma, hopelessness that there is any other way out of a life of poverty.

Now we are getting somewhere.

So, why is education not the key? Well, it certainly is one of the keys. But how can you teach someone that getting a letter on a paper will translate to prosperity when entire generations before that student found prosperity through the street? How can you convince a young student that education is the way out when that same student gets no reinforcement from home? How can you give a lecture when fistfights are breaking out in classrooms filled with children as young as third grade?

Without any large-scale social services plan, our best and brightest young teachers become social workers, and they become bouncers. What they can’t do is teach. How could they?

My greatest hope comes from right here on campus. Our faculty, students and administration are doing much of the research and the volunteer work that will rebuild our city’s families and begin healing our broken city.

Now all we need is for the politicians to cast aside ideology, provincial concerns and preconceived ideas and make the hard decisions that will make our once-great city whole again.

We need to vote those politicians in, and we need to demand the ones already in office take a big-picture view of the city.

And we need to start saying, “We need to do something about that crime.”

Michael Giusti is the Maroon adviser and teaches journalism in the School

of Mass Communication