YET, WITH the exception of Wednesday’s speech, Menino tends to downplay the crime problem. "Honestly, I still don’t think we have a major problem. Violent crime is down to the lowest level it’s been in 30 years," says Menino, who nonetheless acknowledges that the number of murders in Boston went up last year. "One homicide is too many," he says. Privately, however, he is hardly running away from the upsurge in violence. Before 8 a.m. on the morning after the Persad shooting, he speed-dialed a slew of community and religious leaders from Boston’s African-American neighborhoods. "What I did that Sunday morning, I called many of the ministers in the city to help us through this difficult time," says Menino. "As mayor, my job is to be in touch with people."

For years, he remained immune to major crime issues because things worked so well in Boston. With Paul Evans as police commissioner, the "Boston model" of law enforcement successfully knit together consultation with community groups, neighborhood patrols, and community policing; Evans, for example, gave each district its own drug unit. For years, this model helped drive murder rates in Boston to near-record lows, without the rapid increase in police-brutality complaints that followed similar efforts in New York. As a result, the Boston model was emulated by cities across the country throughout the ’90s.

But with the current uptick in street violence, the mayor will have to examine the past to learn how to deal with what is for him a new kind of crisis. He can learn a lot by studying what former Boston mayors did and didn’t do to fight violent street crime. There are a few basic lessons for him to master, but the central principles involve confronting the problem, addressing the needs of the embattled neighborhoods as much as possible, and helping the police do their job.

Violent street crime didn’t hit Boston hard until the 1980s, with the eruption of gang violence. There had, of course, been notorious periods of high crime in Boston before — some of them even gang-related — but those episodes somehow failed to penetrate political consciousness. In the 1960s, Mayor John Collins faced two major crime problems: a serial killer known as the Boston Strangler, who killed 13 women, and the war between the Irish Winter Hill gang and the McLaughlin brothers. (In one infamous incident, a prominent gangster was gunned down in front of 100 people in Charlestown’s City Square. No one saw anything.) But for whatever reason, nobody held Collins responsible for these gruesome events. The Boston Strangler was viewed as an isolated aberration, and as for the gangsters, well, they were only killing each other. Other than encouraging police to do their jobs, Collins, from what everybody remembers, did little to address the gang wars.

"You can go back to the Irish gang wars of the 1960s, but there’s an idea that those who live by the sword, die by the sword," says Evans. "When there is outrage in this city, when there is hue and cry, is when people see an innocent victim and say, ‘That could be my child, or that could be me.’ "

Mayor Kevin White, who governed the city during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, never had to confront a major spike in the city’s murder rate. Still, Menino has more to learn from White than from Collins on this score. White’s crime problems related primarily to race and segregation issues. The 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. set off a wave of rioting in Boston, which would likely have been worse had not White appeared on stage at the Boston Garden with musician James Brown to plead for calm at a concert that was broadcast (by arrangement with the city) on WGBH. While it’s not a perfect analogy, Menino could take a page from White’s hands-on demeanor during that crisis — and so far, at least, he seems to be trying to do just that.

Later, White enjoyed much less success trying to calm the city’s forced-busing crisis, when riots were common in South Boston and Charlestown. During that period, the city acquired a horrible reputation for racial tension, illustrated by Boston Herald American photographer Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning photo of a white man assaulting an African-American lawyer with an American flag on City Hall Plaza in the summer of ’76. That image alone was enough to destroy any hope the charismatic White had of getting on the 1976 presidential ticket. Still, traditional street crime, shootings and such, were relatively rare during that period, and by the start of White’s fourth term in 1980, the crime rate in Boston had actually fallen.

Cut to 1984, when Mayor Ray Flynn, a former state representative from Southie, took it upon himself to bridge Boston’s racial divide. Even his choice for police commissioner — Mickey Roache, who had headed the widely respected Community Disorders Unit, which dealt with racial violence in Boston — reflected that priority. "The big issue for me was the issue of healing the city — not only between neighborhoods, but between neighborhoods and downtown," recalls Flynn. "It was more making people feel proud of Boston once again, recognizing there were more things in common than divided them, and ending discrimination against people in housing and education." The mayor, a former Providence College hoops star, took to playing pick-up basketball with neighborhood kids, which won over at least some community leaders.

As Flynn worked to heal the racial divide, stricter federal drug laws that put away a generation of older drug dealers helped reduce violent crime. But with the incarceration of these old-timers, a vacuum opened up — one eventually filled by a new generation of hip-hop-influenced gangbangers. And they had one crucial new ingredient: crack, a purified, crystallized form of cocaine that offered intense highs at affordable prices.

Flynn remembers the first time he heard of crack. He had traveled down to New York City to visit then-mayor Ed Koch, along with Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley and several other prominent mayors. "We traveled the streets [of New York] for three days where crack cocaine was having such a large impact," recalls Flynn, who then took Bradley up on an invitation to visit Los Angeles, where a deadly mix of crack and gangs was turning parts of the city into war zones. The Boston mayor toured the Mexican border and the drug capital of Tijuana and learned how notorious LA drug-dealing gangs, such as the Crips and the Bloods, were making inroads in other Western cities, such as Denver. Flynn braced himself for the worst.

"I’m a street kid myself, and it frightened me," he says.

But as gang culture gradually took hold in Boston, the Flynn administration, focusing more on racial tensions than street crime, was slow to deal with the problem. Whimsical newspaper stories reported the proliferation of laced-together pairs of basketball shoes slung over telephone wires around the city, but few observers at the time understood that the shoes represented the city’s toughest gangs — Intervale, Castlegate, Humboldt — marking their territory. Before long, gang-related crime became a problem nobody could escape. When young Tiffany Moore, a South Carolina native who was vacationing in Boston, was killed by a gang member’s stray bullet, the mayor had to take action. Much like Menino, who reached out immediately to the Persad family, Flynn headed right to the Moore household.

The former mayor contends today that he helped put in place some of the strategies — such as helping to create and organize neighborhood groups, convincing law-enforcement agents to engage in community policing, working closely with the clergy — later employed by Boston police under Menino, which drove down the murder rate. And it all had to be done on the cheap. "It was also a period of time where we had to be very, very creative," Flynn recalls. "We never had any money. I never served as mayor of Boston when there was a Democratic [presidential] administration."

Flynn’s police, meanwhile, identified "400 notorious gang leaders" who they thought were responsible for much of the city’s street violence. Law-enforcement authorities believed that if they could get the leaders off the street, the city would quiet down. The district attorney used "direct indictment" to speed prosecutions.