A picture of a domestic Sys-Admin force looks like:

Black ministers in Boston, responding to a surge in youth violence, have launched a drive to recruit, train, and deploy 1,000 volunteers to work with at-risk young people from the city’s toughest and poorest neighborhoods.

The initiative, the largest undertaken since the youth crime wave of the early 1990s, aims to greatly expand the ministers’ street-level involvement in fighting violence. It also seeks to revive the community-police partnership that was a key factor in the drastic reduction in the city’s homicide rate from 1996 until last year.

Stable and sustainable order is about more than just police enforcement. It is about developing the fabric of a community - an approach that has shown success before:

The police department will help train volunteers and will develop deployment strategies for the initiative, which is being launched by the Boston TenPoint Coalition, a group of churches and faith-based organizations founded in 1992 to combat gang violence.

The first 100 volunteers are nearing the end of their training and will be deployed on neighborhood walks, home visits, and mentoring assignments after a final training session with Police Superintendent Paul Joyce next week.

The volunteers will try to build trust between neighborhood residents and police, improve police response to community problems, and reconnect community groups to young people, TenPoint leaders say.

…'’There is a realization that we’ve been asleep at the wheel,” said the Rev. Jeffrey L. Brown, a Dorchester resident and pastor of Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, speaking of the clergy, law-enforcement agencies, and social service organizations that collaborated so effectively in the 1990s that their work became known nationally as ‘’the Boston miracle.”

Last summer there was a smaller scale effort with a similar philosophy that caught my eye. Lyndhurst Street had been characterized as a “Hell Zone:”

…residents and activists say the corner is in state of lawlessness. They say young people from other neighborhoods take care of their illegal business on Lyndhurst because they know they can get away with it.

In response, the Rev. Bruce Wall of Global Ministries Christian Church decided to “occupy” the street for a week.

At the beginning of the Rev. Bruce Wall’s weeklong occupation of Lyndhurst Street, he and six followers did exactly what they had set out to do: They tried to confront the bands of dope dealers, prostitutes, and other young people who were hanging out at night on the street corner that some residents call the Hell Zone.

But by the middle of the week, Wall had a gang of his own: about three-dozen Boston police officers, MBTA police, probation officers, city councilors, clergymen, cameramen, and flashing police cruisers were at his side.

Everyone agreed that the effort made the street safer in the short term. But, as in counterinsurgency warfare, the ability to remain in an area and maintain the gains is a challenge:

‘’They’ll be back when all this is over,” said Jimmy Ambroise, 16… referring to the characters who strike fear in Lyndhurst residents at night.

Rev. Wall has been maintaining a presence on the street and there have been some positive signs:

‘’It’s probably stopped some people from running a very profitable business on that corner,” said Emmett Folgert, director of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative. ‘’Even if things don’t change right now, a seed is planted.”

I used the counterinsurgency comparision very deliberately. Nobody is going to confuse Dorchester for Ramadi, but the challenges presented by each lie on a continuum with peace, harmony and security at one extreme and a Hobbesian state of nature on the other. While there is no single silver bullet strategy for transitioning a region from one extreme to the other, there are strategies that have been shown to be successful over certain portions of the continuum. Just as a successful counterinsurgency campaign needs to involve more than just military force, developing and securing urban neighborhoods needs more than just police officers. The hot questions become: are there successful networking approaches (social networks, collaborative online tools, inter-agency iniatives, public-private sector partnerships) that can be collected? Could we develop a toolkit of techniqes, technologies and strategies that would make us better at this, so we don’t have to keep re-inventing the wheel? Can we reach the point where there is an established body of expertise concerning these problems? What would be the Detriot equivalent of the Boston TenPoint Coalition? What would the Afghan equivalent look like?

That’s what Sys-Admin means to me.