The beat goes on with local violent crime: A 66-year-old Belleville woman was stabbed to death Friday. A 49-year-old man was gunned down at midnight Saturday near Sherman Park on the city’s north side. A U.S. Park Service ranger shot and killed a man who drove a vehicle that hit him early Sunday morning near the Arch grounds.

It may be small comfort to note that this is not just a St. Louis problem. It is a disturbing national trend.

In the early years of this decade, law enforcement agencies, including those here, basked in the glow of record reductions in homicides, robberies and aggravated assaults. That started to change in the middle of the decade. Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton called it a “gathering storm,” a title adopted for a 2006 report by the Police Executive Research Forum, a leading law enforcement think tank.

Its conclusions were bleak: FBI data for 2005 recorded the greatest annual jump in violent crime in 14 years.

The report cited various reasons for the storm: a booming population of younger criminals with no respect for life; a culture of violence fueled by popular culture; a revolving door in the prison and parole system.

The storm continued into 2006. St. Louis, for example, saw violent crime rise 20 percent in 2005 and another 3.4 percent in 2006. The figure fell by 11 percent in 2007, but this year the city of St. Louis has had an especially nasty string of homicides, recording 63 through May 31. Twelve more were recorded in the first 10 days of June. By the end of June, the total was 85, compared with 138 for all of 2007.

There are lots of theories. Consider an article in the July/August issue of The Atlantic magazine: “Why crime is coming back — and why no one wants to talk about it.”

The author argues that the breakup of traditional public housing projects contributes significantly to the rise in crime. She states that the use of Section 8 housing vouchers to scatter public housing residents across a wider geographic area creates a larger staging ground for crime.

The theory is speculative. In truth, one reason massive public housing projects across the country were abandoned was criminologists concluded that they served as incubators for crime.

As with so many things, logic is a better guide. Violent street crime flourishes in the presence of poverty and hopelessness. A very high percentage of homicides are committed by young men with little family guidance, less education and no job prospects.

For them, selling drugs, carrying guns and settling grudges become ways of life.

But street gangs and young killers have been around for decades. Why did crime drop so markedly beginning in the late 1990s and continuing into the early years of this decade?

There were more cops on the street, the result of federal programs that since have been abandoned. Policing methods emphasized active partnerships with local communities. Vastly improved technology allowed police to connect crime patterns to specific locations virtually in real time.

Richard Rosenfeld, a University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist, sees one key difference between then and now: In the late ’90s and early 2000s, a strong national economy accompanied record levels of incarceration. Today, the economy is weakening, and many of the criminals who were in jail have returned to the community.

What can a community do in the face of these national trends?

In the short term, we should give cops better tools to take guns off the street. We should focus more resources on what the law enforcement group’s report calls “hometown” security as an element of homeland security.

But long-term solutions will require a much greater commitment by the entire community to address poverty, to find jobs for offenders returning to society, to provide treatment for substance addiction and mental illness and to deliver a decent education to young people.

Anything less is temporary and provisional, not serious or sustainable.