There are only three anti-crime initiatives that absolutely, positively, never, never work.

One is the anti-crime rally or parade or church confab, in which folks from dangerous neighborhoods march and pray and applaud in the company of guilty suburbanites, in the futile hope that the bad guys will be frightened away by the power of prayer and footsteps.

Another failed strategy is the creation of an anti-crime plan, based on no research, no data points, and no methodology with which to evaluate results – with the understanding that by the time the government grant is dispersed to all your friends, no one will remember what was promised, anyway.

The third unsuccessful option is “community policing,” which theorizes that cops will have a lot more success with the bad guys through the magic of a big group hug, rather than arrests and stuff.

Despite the fact that there is a loving, compassionate God, criminals (much like editors and Human Resources directors) will always be with us, so almost any proposal is worth a look in the crime-fighting biz, especially if you’ve an anti-crime kind of politician or consultant.

Planned Obsolescence

The latest plan to emerge in Boston comes from the deep pockets of the Boston Foundation, which will team up with city cops and squadrons of social workers to bore the bad guys to death in and around Blue Hill Avenue.

Rumor, and a mediocre data base, suggests that there are about 2,000 young thugs in and around Blue Hill causing trouble – and the multi-million-dollar solution may be to hire 25 “violence interrupters” to sit the bad boys down, offer them a cigar, teach them how to play chess, and show them the error of their ways.

The street workers may or may not be the usual army of earnest young social-worker types. The new program suggests that former thugs who have sinned and seen the light and sin no more may be among those going out to calm the mean streets of the city.

The “street worker is your friend” approach to crime fighting is certainly not new; it pops up across the country in large part because the “clinical” side of the bleeding-heart conspiracy appreciates the notion that the thugs will be treated more as clients than as dangerous sociopaths.

As the Boston street workers fan out to meet-and-greet the bad guys, the Criminal History Systems Board is cranking up a database on all manner of Massachusetts gang membership, tattoo design, and criminal instincts across the state.

The two initiatives don’t seem to be coordinated, although there is some concern that, without database confirmation, the street workers might mistake a Fidelity investment analyst for a gang member and make some crude joke about his momma.

A cranky minority among the criminal justice types suggest that these kinds of dreamy anti-crime projects are focused more directly on writing paychecks for middle-income social service professionals than actually reducing crime.

These old-fashioned crime fighters, who live in underground caverns below Commonwealth Avenue and only come out at night, suggest that the Boston crime-fighting bureaucracy might do well to visit New Jersey, where the state cops and the attorney general recently shrugged, unleashed the dogs of hell, and conducted a state-wide sweep, arresting 1,800 suspected gang members, including 29 people wanted on murder charges. In the alternative, of course, New Jersey could have hired themselves some violence interrupters.

An interesting approach initiated last month in Los Angeles saw city attorneys file civil suits against gang leaders already under arrest, seeking penalties for damages from gang activity that may or may not have been directed by the bad boys, even after they were jailed. To transform the gritty business of gang-busting into civil litigation with a corporate flavor is way cool – and would certainly find a happy home in the Massachusetts courts.

Of course, at the end of the day or week or month or year, we all sit back and look at some nightmarish jump in one crime statistic or another – and wonder what ever happened to the latest anti-crime initiative.

As the brilliant scholar-politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it many decades ago, “Nobody knows a damn thing about crime.”