Bermuda's latest shooting death only adds more emphasis for the need for the community to come together to stop the madness that is engulfing Bermuda's young people.

The latest death in what is thought to be a gang-related attack shows how difficult it is to put an end to the violence without getting to the bottom of what makes people join gangs and how they can be persuaded to take a different path.

To that end, this newspaper again recommends that the Police and the Government again look at the Ceasefire programme that is showing results in the US, especially in communities where the Police are viewed with suspicion and people are reluctant to come forward as witnesses.

This alternative policing strategies, pioneered in Boston by criminologist David Kennedy and others, according to the Seattle Times, tackles crimes be bringing together entire groups and telling them: "Stop the killings or we'll come down hard, not just on a shooter but everyone in his gang, for things like parole violations, drug dealing and unpaid child support."

This alternative strategy, in which gang members are given alternatives between taking up job and education opportunities or facing unpleasant consequences, has had success in Boston, Cincinnati, High Point, North Carolina and other US communities.

The great advantage of this approach? It works. And Bermuda has to acknowledge that it is now in a crisis in which it must look to any strategies that have had proven success and take them up. That's why this newspaper supports the Mirrors programme. But something more needs to be done to end this crisis now before any more young men are killed. Ceasefire or a similar programme might be the answer.

According to Newsweek Magazine, this is what happened in High Point, North Carolina in 2005: "Kennedy got the cops to try a new way of cleaning up the corners. They rounded up some young dealers; showed a videotape of them dealing drugs; and readied cases, set for indictment, that would have meant hard time in prison. Then they let the kids go. Working with their families, the police helped the dope dealers find job training and mentors. The message, which spread quickly through the neighborhood, was that the cops would give kids a second chance but come down aggressively if they didn't take it. The police won back trust they had lost long ago (if they ever had it). After four years, police in High Point had wiped the drug dealers off the corner. They compared the numbers to the prior four years and found a 57 percent drop in violent crime in the targeted area.

"'We've been in this cycle in which law enforcement pushed harder and harder and harder, which drives the community further and further away,' Kennedy tells Newsweek. 'That creates additional space for the relatively few bad guys to operate, which makes law enforcement push harder and makes the community step further back. We're in this spiral of decline, and the great revelation of the High Point work was that we can consciously step out of that spiral and, in fact, reverse it.' Kennedy's research shows that shockingly small numbers of people dozens, not hundreds cause the violence plaguing cities' worst areas. Most people just want a safe place to live, but feel anger toward heavy-handed police. The most effective cops are not the ones who make buy-busts, but who can find a dealer, show him photos of him committing a crime and give him a genuine choice: get straight or go to jail."

High Point is not your classic inner city. It has a population of less than 100,000 and is a reasonably successful southern city, diverse in race and its economy. Clearly, it felt it had to do something and it did. Bermuda can too.