TUESDAY, July 2, 2002 — It’s hazy, hot, and humid. The weather forecasters say it will be 96 degrees today. Less than two weeks since spring ended, it’s clear that the long hot summer — in both senses — is upon us.

The front-page of today's Boston Herald pretty much tells the story. A grainy photo of 10-year-old shooting victim Trina Persad — killed in the crossfire of a street-gang shootout — wrapped in bandages adorns the Herald’s cover under the headline anguish. The most wrenching touch? The small doll to Persad’s right. (So much for the Herald’s avoidance of graphic photos.) Closer to home, only minutes after I drove by the MDC basketball courts near Nantasket Beach in Hull Saturday night, one 20-year-old stabbed another 20-year-old to death; at least it wasn’t a gun battle, which always carries the danger if harming innocent victims.

Victims like Tiffany Moore. Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker had it right yesterday when he likened Persad's story to that of Moore, an 11-year-old killed in 1988 while sitting on a mailbox when a gang-member’s bullet struck and killed her. Today’s situation is starting to resemble the out-of-control violence that existed in much of the city back then. But we're not there quite yet.

If you were a reporter in Boston during that era — the late '80s through the early '90s — you knew the names of local gangs the way later reporters knew local real-estate developers. They named themselves after local streets. Castlegate, Intervale, Humboldt were among the most fearsome. The West Coast Crips and Bloods never really made it here, and that's partly because of the ferocity and power of Boston's street gangs at that time.

The situation hasn’t worsened to the point where we’re reading Kremlinological reports on the rivalries between the new Boston gangs, but I’m waiting. There’s a sense in the air that the police don’t really know what is happening or why. In Walker's story, Menino called the violence a " mystery. "

The resurgence of crime isn’t unique to Boston. It’s happening in New York too. Writing about the unexpected uptick in crime, New York Post columnist John Podhoretz finally got the chance to emulate his neoconservative father, Norman, in a matter of domestic policy. In a particularly gripping piece — because it involved a personal story — Podhoretz writes of his narrow escape from a Brooklyn car-jacking. Aside from the inherent drama in the narrative itself — Podhoretz describes how he " peeled out and got back onto Atlantic instantly " to avoid the crime — is his observation that the decline in crime in the 1990s changed everyone’s sensibilities and prompted people to lower their guard. His story shows how the crooks used the recent era of good feelings in New York to their advantage.

As long as crime seemed to be on the decline, political officials, the police, and the community — here and elsewhere — were prepared to let the crime problem take care of itself. The Globe’s Walker rightly warned yesterday that " the old formula really doesn’t work anymore. "

As city looks for ways to counter the new crime wave, it needs to do something new: figure out exactly what is going on. Because without an understanding of what is causing the violence this time around, they’ll never be able to stop it.