I've got a story in today's paper about the city's (possibly) imperfect anti-gang plan.

For all the good the program will do, there's a lot it might not. Part of the problem is in the name: Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. Prevention—cutting gang recruiters off before they can recruit middle-school kids into gangs—seems like an obvious solution, but prevention only addresses half the problem.

"Those kids in high schools have probably been around the gangs long enough that it's tougher," SPD's Wilson says. "Prevention won't work. They're already so involved."

The city's youth violence prevention prevention initiative isn't the only back-assward anti-gang program. There's also the impossible-to-use anonymous text-a-tip line:

1. Select text “Messaging” or “SMS” (short messaging service) on your phone’s main menu.

2. Create (compose) a new message, beginning with the keyword Tip486 (not case sensitive) in the body of the message.

3. Send the message to the short code of 274637 (Crimes)

4. Your initial submission will trigger an auto response from the secure transaction server. You will receive brief notes and a unique code number to that response. You must remember this code number, as it cannot be retrieved later. You and the Crime Stoppers coordinator may elect to engage in secure and encrypted two-way dialog at the time with no additional keywords being required to communicate with the system.

5. You can text STOP to the short code 274637 (CRIMES) at any time to rest the system where you cannot be replied to by Crime Stoppers. If you do not send stop any further text messages from the same phone do not get a reply but are received. Any new text messages would require the TIP486 keyword again and would be assigned a new code number by the system

Seriously, who the fuck is going to do this? I've tried to reach Crime Stoppers—which runs the text-a-tip program—to find out how many tips they've received, but haven't had any luck.

If law enforcement's actually serious about getting people to "snitch" or whatever, they need to dream up a service that's a bit more user friendly than this one.