It's gonna be a busy weekend around the Hickey household. Here's the to-do list: Up-armor the Toyota. Buy a Tec-9 or five. Train the dog to attack faces indiscriminately. Install a panic room in the basement, fill it with canned goods and hole up till things even out.

Yep, I got survival on my mind. The way people are getting mowed down in these killing fields, it's irresponsible even just to walk along a city street without figuring you're about to get mortally shot. Disagree? Guess you haven't seen the news lately. It's all murder. All the time.

I wouldn't exactly say all the attention being thrown at last year's homicide-rate increase constitutes murder coverage most foul. Each and every one of our 380 citymates who lost their lives to violence in 2005 represents the tragedy of a shattered family. But the fact that everybody's fixated on a simple statistic, one that loses a bit of its magnanimity when put in its proper context is, well, foul murder coverage.

That context? While 2005 brought the most city homicides in the past eight years, it's nowhere near 1990, when 503 were recorded. Nor does it touch the subsequent seven years, in which Murdadelphia had a 435-homicide average. And if we're on such a slow march toward civic implosion why, then, can Commissioner Sylvester Johnson accurately state that just in 2002, the city recorded its lowest homicide rate since the pre-crack era?

That's simple: Statistics can be used to make any case. Which is why we need to forget about the number of homicides, and start talking about the deep-seated cultural explanations for why people kill. After all, it's easier to produce a two-minute Dead-Dead-Everywhere! news segment than to jam up the gun lobby or force absentee birth fathers to man up and raise their children. I think that's the point Johnson was trying to make Tuesday afternoon when he hosted his first-ever—and, as he joked, probably last—open media availability at the Roundhouse.

Johnson didn't much seem like he wanted to be there. Hard to blame him, considering his beeper had beeped thrice overnight with homicide calls. He delivered an opening statement about the recently launched Operation Safer Streets, through which he and Mayor Street hope the police can crack down on violence by, among other things, stopgap-targeting "hot spots" with $10 million in police overtime. He then explained that statistics fluctuate so much that law-enforcement experts don't worry much about them. That rather than harping on "380," people should examine the frustration forcing people to lash out, especially in a town where guns are as easy to procure as soft pretzels. Valid points, all, and worthy of a public airing. But when he opened up the floor to questions, lo and behold, guess what he was asked:

"Commissioner, is this a city in crisis?"

Were I Johnson, I'd have launched over the podium and whooped someone's ass with a billy club. Alas, he didn't.

"If we're in crisis today," he retorted, "what were we when we had 500?"

Murders may be down in other major cities this year, but Johnson made it clear that putting extra cops on a few corners won't exactly teach people to value lives, especially their own. Echoing the message of the mayor's crosstown Safer Streets weekend cavalcade, Johnson said the community as a whole—the public, private, social-services and religious sectors—needs to realize that the solution goes deeper than policing. And that we're all responsible—even the press, whose stories create a culture of fear—for figuring out how to make it stop (My words, not his). It won't be easy, but it seems as if there's a groundswell behind it.

Street's getting the backing of clergy members, who'll open their houses of worship, and neighborhood groups, who will make rec centers and even their own homes available, to redirect troubled youths. On the business (and political) side of things, soon-to-be mayoral candidate John Dougherty launched an "Enough is Enough" mentorship program over at Local 98 headquarters on Tuesday. Though he's still working on the specifics, it's the type of initiative that could offer kids, through mentorship, alternatives. The receiving line of labor leaders who said they'd chip in time and money make it seem even more promising. (Let's hope it translates into well-paying jobs down the line.)

People aren't just going to up and turn their guns in because the city sets up a new hotline, but if local pols straddle that ever-tricky church-state line, their coalition might help teach a generation of kids that there are other ways to settle their differences than murder. Otherwise, the cycle will continue eternally and we'll be left to dwell on meaningless statistics.

Pie-in-the-sky? Maybe. But the quicker we figure out how to better the lives of the most desperate among us, the sooner I'll be able to emerge from the panic room.