He said the Homeland Security Department was among a half-dozen government agencies that received regular briefings that day from him and other officials by way of video conference calls.

Administration officials have said they did not realize the severe damage Katrina had caused until after the storm had passed. But under oath, Brown told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee he could not explain why his appeals failed to produce a faster response.

"I expected them to cut every piece of red tape, do everything they could ... that I didn't want to hear anybody say that we couldn't do everything they humanly could to respond to this," Brown said about a video conference with administration officials _ in which President Bush briefly participated _ the day before Katrina hit. "Because I knew in my gut this was the bad one."

In the end, the hurricane claimed more than 1,300 lives, uprooted hundreds of thousands more and caused tens of billions of dollars worth of damage in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities.

Brown, in his second Capitol Hill appearance since Katrina, told his side to the senators five months after he quit under fire as chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He agreed with some senators who characterized him as a scapegoat for government failures.

"I feel somewhat abandoned," Brown said.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has said he did not know that New Orleans' levees were breached until Aug. 30. Bush at the time said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

At an occasionally contentious White House briefing Friday, press secretary Scott McClellan said there were conflicting reports about the levees in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

"We knew of the flooding that was going on," McClellan said. "That's why our top priority was focused on saving lives. ... The cause of the flooding was secondary to that top priority and that's the way it should be."

After three hours of testimony, Brown was handed a subpoena ordering him to reappear in front of a House panel investigating the storm response. He is expected to be questioned by House investigators this weekend _ days before the panel plans to release its findings on the storm.

Recounting conference calls that described initial damage reports the day Katrina hit, Brown scoffed at claims that Homeland Security didn't know about the devastation's scope until the next day. He called those claims "just baloney."

Some senators suggested Brown look inward before pointing the finger elsewhere.

"You're not prepared to put a mirror in front of your face and recognize your own inadequacies," said Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn. "Perhaps you may get a more sympathetic hearing if you had a willingness to confess your own sins in this."

Brown responded: "That's very easy for you to say sitting behind that dais and not being there in the middle of that disaster watching that human suffering and watching those people dying and trying to deal with those structural dysfunctionalities, even within the federal government."

The disjointed federal response, Brown said, was in part the result of FEMA being swallowed in 2003 by the newly created Homeland Security Department, which he said was focused on fighting terrorism.

Natural disasters "had become the stepchild of the Department of Homeland Security," he said. Had there been a report that "a terrorist had blown up the 17th Street Canal levee, then everybody would have jumped all over that," he added.

Some senators attempted to trace the failures back to the White House.

"You quite appropriately and admirably wanted to get the word to the president as quickly as you could," Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said in asking about Brown's conversation with Hagin on the evening of Aug. 29. "Did you tell Mr. Hagin in that phone call that New Orleans was flooding?"

Brown replied, "I think I told him that we were realizing our worst nightmare, that everything we had planned about, worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10 years was coming true."

I'm sure you have dealt with the anguish of preparing your youth to conform to the image of Christ. You have fought with Hollywood and the Music Industry to gain the minds and hearts of America's youth. Many today within the Church are ready to surrender our most valuable resource (our children) to the enemy's camp. I AM NOT! God has a work for the young men and women of today. A work that depends on us to train and lead them to "fight the good fight of faith."

Our Lord has developed within my heart a burden to train these young men and women. With this in mind, I began to draw upon my training as a Pathfinder in the U.S. Army. I reasoned that the methods employed in the Armed Forces of this nation had led to many victories and freedom to all. Why could we as Christians not glean the benefits of the same?

Laid within five sections of the C.O.M.B.A.T. course: COMMITMENT... OBEDIENCE... MIND... BODY... ATTITUDE... TESTIMONY..... We have constructed hands on object lessons that will educate, enlighten, and even entertain the young men and women who complete this course.

Within this Site you will find a brief description of the course. I truly feel this course will be a highlight of the youth program at your church. The course offers intense training, affordable pricing, and Truth that will be taken home and passed on to others.

In Christ Jesus our Lord,

Bryan Mowery

"The battle is in the field"

Director Eugene Jarecki has put together a wonderful, moving and important film that examines the modern American military machine and the modern American militaristic mindset.

His film is the 2005 Sundance Film Festival’s Documentary Award-winning Why We Fight. The title of the film recalls Frank Capra’s World War II films – popular movies that promoted, eulogized and helped mythologize America’s participation and sacrifice in that war.
We fought in World War II for many reasons, but mostly it seems, because we believed.

Why We Fight carefully illustrates how our beliefs, our national character, our shared view of ourselves as Americans have changed since World War II. Jarecki utilizes President Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech of January 17th, 1961. In this speech, Ike warned of a growing military-industrial complex, and its possible negative impact on our democracy and our republic. As the late Colonel David Hackworth used to remind me, Eisenhower spoke of the dangers presented by military-industrial-congressional complex.

Eisenhower advised there was a “…danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” He reminded us, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. He said,

…we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

I had never before watched Eisenhower’s farewell speech until I saw Why We Fight. Those who are today manning the ship of state in Washington, D.C., like people my age, completely missed this prophetic speech. As Ike passed the presidential baton to a fresh new face, a youthful George W. Bush, like most of his generation, was focused on high school shenanigans, and the American people basked in long-awaited economic prosperity.

Ike knew a thing or two about war, American government, and our nascent military-industrial complex. Eisenhower worried, but we weren’t paying attention – at least in 1961. When asked why he made the film, Jarecki said, “Americans [today] have a visceral sense that something is rotten, but no-one can seem to connect the dots…. I wanted to make this film because we need what Eisenhower called an ‘alert and knowledgeable citizenry’ to compel change, to improve the public’s ability to monitor those in power ”

Why We Fight is filmed in a new kind of America. It is still filled with everyday people pulling together for glory, Capra-style. But this documentary carefully and intelligently reveals the present-day fruition of Ike’s darker vision.

Many everyday Americans are featured in Why We Fight. A father who lost his son in the Twin Tower attacks on 9-11. Workers making armaments on massive factory floors, and workers writing global engagement policy prescriptions from inside carefully appointed urban thinktanks. Politicians and contractors and military recruiters and soldiers. These simultaneously common and uncommon people are key to the film’s humanity and its directness – because these people are us.

However, Jarecki’s steady hand reveals that while we are indeed Frank Capra’s Americans, we are today, in Jarecki’s words, “ …caught in a vortex of spiraling militarisation and moral and economic bankruptcy, and [we] feel remote from and powerless to change those forces.”

Why We Fight grapples with this sense of moral and economic bankruptcy that many feel as we stay the course and fight wars in Iraq, and elsewhere. The film illuminates the “insolvent phantom of tomorrow” that Ike foretold, and it attempts to get underneath the superficial explanations, and ideological perspectives. In Jarecki’s words, “We tend to hunt for heroes and villains, rather than study roots of the problem. I wanted to make a film that goes beyond the focus on the individual.”

Jarecki gets it. He understands and clearly articulates how the care and feeding of the American military leviathan has been, and remains, a shared role of both Democratic and Republican Parties. There hasn’t been an antiwar party at the national level for decades, and it is easy to see why. What Cold War competition, massive federalization and sophisticated and relentless government agitprop pitting “us” against “them” has produced is summed up in a Raytheon worker’s reflection on her job. She pauses for a moment, and says, “I’d really rather be making toys for Santa.” But she isn’t.

Will Washington, D.C. like the film? It is hard to predict whether the Bush Administration or the loyal opposition in Congress will be first to launch a stone at Why We Fight. Jarecki has provided an apolitical history and an apolitical reality, portraying an America evolved in a direction that Eisenhower almost exactly foretold.

Can the military-industrial-congressional complex be reined in? Should it be? To the extent that Jarecki passes judgment on the latter question, he defers to Eisenhower in the affirmative. It should be “compelled” and controlled by an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, such that “security and liberty” may prosper together. But can it be?

The film is perhaps less optimistic of whether it can be reined in, as an interesting clip with Senator John McCain discussing the growth of the military industrial complex is cut short by an urgent phone call from the former CEO of Halliburton, and Vice President of the United States.

But what I really find inspiring about Why We Fight is that we see the words, thoughts and deeds of the average American in this movie – the factory worker, the fathers and mothers and sons and daughters, the backbone of this nation. To a person, it is these Americans who exude patriotism and deep abiding love for this country. It is these Americans who, with all their faults, are founts of common decency and morality. Jarecki is excruciatingly fair in his portrayal of war promoting policy wonks and war policy beneficiaries like Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. But the fact remains that these policy designers simply don’t make a hell of a lot of sense.

Jarecki has both artfully and scientifically pulled away the curtain that currently shields the pillars of the present-day American military-industrial-congressional complex. For this reason, the film will be downplayed by the leadership in Washington, D.C., on both sides of the aisle.

But Why We Fight will be watched by millions and millions of Americans who are now weary of strange endless wars in far away places and an economy wasting under the demands of voracious spending on “defense.” These American, as I did upon watching the film, will begin to really think about what we have become. These Americans will become newly awake, newly alert, newly watchful. These Americans will begin to embrace and assert, as did our forefathers, the blessed idea that we are governed and directed by our own consent, and none other. Eisenhower would certainly approve.

These Americans' absolute refusal to knuckle under had been hardened by service in World War II. Having fought to free other countries from murderous regimes, they rejected vicious abuse by their county government.

These Americans had a choice. Their state's Constitution -- Article 1, Section 26 -- recorded their right to keep and bear arms for the common defense. Few "gun control" laws had been enacted.

These Americans were residents of McMinn County, which is located between Chattanooga and Knoxville in Eastern Tennessee. The two main towns were Athens and Etowah. McMinn County residents had long been independent political thinkers. For a long time they also had: accepted bribe-taking by politicians and/or the sheriff to overlook illicit whiskey-making and ; financed the sheriff's department from fines-usually for speeding or public drunkenness which promoted false arrests; and put up with voting fraud by both Democrats and Republicans.

The wealthy Cantrell family, of Etowah, backed Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1932 election, hoping New Deal programs would revive the local economy and help Democrats to replace Republicans in the county government. So it proved.

Paul Cantrell was elected sheriff in the 1936,1938 and 1940 elections, but by slim margins. The sheriff was the key county official. Cantrell was elected to the state senate in 1942 and 1944; his chief deputy, Pat Mansfield, was elected sheriff. In 1946 Paul Cantrell again sought the sheriff's office.

At the end of 1945, some 3,000 battle-hardened veterans returned to McMinn County; the GIs held Cantrell politically responsible for Mansfield's doings. Early in 1946, some newly returned ex-GIs decided to challenge Cantrell politically by offering an all-ex-GI, non-partisan ticket. They promised a fraud-free election, stating in ads and speeches that there would be an honest ballot count and reform of county government.

At a rally, a GI speaker said, "The principles that we fought for in this past war do not exist in McMinn County. We fought for democracy because we believe in democracy but not the form we live under in this county" (Daily Post-Athenian, 17 June 1946, p.1 ). At the end of July 1946, 159 McMinn County GIs petitioned the FBI to send election monitors. There was no response. The Department of Justice had not responded to McMinn County residents' complaints of election fraud in 1940, 1942 and 1944.

FROM BALLOTS TO BULLETS

The primary election was held on August 1. To intimidate voters, Mansfield brought in some 200 armed "deputies." GI poll-watchers were beaten almost at once. At about 3 p.m., Tom Gillespie, an African- American voter was told by a sheriff's deputy that he could not vote. Despite being beaten, Gillespie persisted. The enraged deputy shot him. The gunshot drew a crowd. Rumors spread that Gillespie had been shot in the back; he later recovered (C. Stephen Byrum, The Battle of Athens, Paidia Productions, Chattanooga, TN, 1987; pp. 155-57).

Other deputies detained ex-GI poll-watchers in a polling place, as that made the ballot counting "Public" A crowd gathered. Sheriff Mansfield told his deputies to disperse the crowd. When the two ex-GIs smashed a big window and escaped, the crowd surged forward. The deputies, with guns drawn, formed a tight half-circle around the front of the polling place. One deputy, "his gun raised high...shouted: 'If you sons of bitches cross this street I'll kill you!'" (Byrum, p.165).

Mansfield took the ballot boxes to the jail for counting. The deputies seemed to fear immediate attack by the "people who had just liberated Europe and the South Pacific from two of the most powerful war machines in human history" (Byrum, pp. 168-69).

Short of firearms and ammunition, the GIs scoured the county to find them. By borrowing keys to the National Guard and State Guard armories, they got three M-1 rifles, five .45 semi-automatic pistols and 24 British Enfield rifles. The armories were nearly empty after the war's end. By 8 p.m. a group of GIs and "local boys" headed for the jail but left the back door unguarded to give the jail's defenders an easy way out.

Three GIs alerting passersby to danger were fired on from the jail. Two GIs were wounded. Other GIs returned fire.

Firing subsided after 30 minutes; ammunition ran low and night had fallen. Thick brick walls shielded those inside the jail. Absent radios, the GIs' rifle fire was uncoordinated. "From the hillside fire rose and fell in disorganized cascades. More than anything else, people were simply shooting at the jail" (Byrum, p.189).

Several who ventured into the street in front of the jail were wounded. One man inside the jail was badly hurt; he recovered. Most sheriff's deputies wanted to hunker down and await rescue. Governor McCord mobilized the State Guard, perhaps to scare the GIs into withdrawing. The State Guard never went to Athens. McCord may have feared that Guard units filled with ex-GIs might not fire on other ex-GIs.

At about 2 a.m. on August 2, the GIs forced the issue. Men from Meigs County threw dynamite sticks and damaged the jail's porch. The panicked deputies surrendered. GIs quickly secured the building. Paul Cantrell faded into the night, having almost been shot by a GI who knew him, but whose .45 pistol had jammed. Mansfield's deputies were kept overnight in jail for their own safety. Calm soon returned. The GIs posted guards. The rifles borrowed from the armory were cleaned and returned before sunup.

THE AFTERMATH: RESTORING DEMOCRACY

In five precincts free of vote fraud, the GI candidate for sheriff, Knox Henry, won 1,168 votes to Cantrell's 789. Other GI candidates won by similar margins.

The GI's did not hate Cantrell. They only wanted honest government. On August 2, a town meeting set up a three-man governing committee. The regular police having fled, six men were chosen to police Etowah. In addition, "Individual citizens were called upon to form patrols or guard groups, often led by a GI... To their credit, however, there is not a single mention of an abuse of power on their behalf" (Byrum, p. 220).

Once the GI candidates' victory had been certified, they cleaned up county government, the jail was fixed, newly elected officials accepted a $5,000 pay limit and Mansfield supporters who resigned were replaced.

The general election on November 5 passed quietly. McMinn County residents, having restored the rule of law, returned to their daily lives. Pat Mansfield moved back to Georgia. Paul Cantrell set up an auto dealership in Etowah. "Almost everyone who knew Cantrell in the years after the Battle' agree that he was not bitter about what had happened" (Byrum pp. 232-33; see also New York Times, 9 August 1946, p. 8).

The 79th Congress adjourned on August 2, 1946, when the Battle of Athens ended. However, Representative John Jennings Jr. from Tennessee decried McMinn County's sorry situation under Cantrell and Mansfield and the Justice Department's repeated failures to help the McMinn County residents. Jennings was delighted that "...at long last, decency and honesty, liberty and law have returned to the fine county of McMinn.. " (Congressional Record, House; U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1946; Appendix, Volume 92, Part 13, p. A4870).

THE LESSONS OF ATHENS

Those who took up arms in Athens, Tennessee, wanted honest elections, a cornerstone of our constitutional order. They had repeatedly tried to get federal or state election monitors and had used armed force so as to minimize harm to the law-breakers, showing little malice to the defeated law-breakers. They restored lawful government.

The Battle of Athens clearly shows how Americans can and should lawfully use armed force and also shows why the rule of law requires unrestricted access to firearms and how civilians with military-type firearms can beat the forces of government gone bad.

Dictators believe that public order is more important than the rule of law. However, Americans reject this idea. Brutal political repression is lethal to many. An individual criminal can harm a handful of people. Governments alone can brutalize thousands, or millions.

Law-abiding McMinn County residents won the Battle of Athens because they were not hamstrung by "gun control " They showed us when citizens can and should use armed force to support the rule of law.

As usual, the iconic moment took place not in the capital but at the heart of the entertainment-industrial complex—in this case, "Oprah." As it happens, I had just been to a screening the night before of "Thank You for Smoking," the forthcoming movie based on the Christopher Buckley book. The story is a hilarious and gloriously politically incorrect sendup of Washington's culture of shameless spin. But the theme depressed me. The satire was all too real—more proof that "truth" and "reality" were not just pretzels to be twisted for commercial purposes but thoroughly devalued coins of the media and political realm. James Frey and Doubleday were just the latest to lie all the way to the bank.

Until Thursday. Something happened in that studio that went beyond "good TV." Such is the power of Oprah that her moment of truth seemed to shame the American public into more respect for the actual facts of a situation. As if to prove the synchronicity, there was even some truth breaking out in the White House press room at the very moment Oprah was airing live in the Midwest. Reporters were pressing President Bush hard. James Gerstenzang of the Los Angeles Times asked Bush if he subscribed to President Nixon's notion that "when the president does it, it's not illegal." This was, indeed, the essence—the truth—of the president's position on the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping, which violates a 1978 law. Instead of the issue being framed in Karl Rove's phony and demagogic terms—where anyone who opposes the president's power grab doesn't want to protect us from Al Qaeda—we were edging our way toward a more accurate depiction of the controversy.

The news conference wasn't a complete truthfest. No reporter managed to ask the president about his statement of April 24, 2004, when Bush told a Buffalo audience: "Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires—a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." This statement was false, and Bush knew it when he said it. The president lied in Buffalo, just as surely as Bill Clinton lied when he said: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." Of course, Bush's Buffalo lie got a tiny fraction of the airplay of Clinton's Lewinsky lie.

The reason goes beyond Clinton's more colorful finger-wagging and sex with an intern. For four and a half years, Bush has politicized 9/11. His political motto has been "The only thing we have to use is fear itself." He was at it again last week, claiming with zero evidence that congressional scrutiny of the illegal NSA wiretapping would "give the enemy a heads-up on what we're doing." The media and the Democrats have both been intimidated by this devastatingly effective political strategy. It won the 2002 and 2004 elections for the Republicans and will continue to be their game plan for this November.

At first glance, making the Democrats seem soft on "terrorist surveillance" looks like another winner for the GOP. For Democrats to explain that they don't oppose all eavesdropping but object to the way it was done is a two-step answer that's too complicated to fly. A better approach would be to argue that Bush's NSA program has been a failure because it has threatened civil liberties and violated the law without doing anything to catch Osama bin Laden. The NSA obviously hasn't been eavesdropping on the right suspects.

This would fit with the Democrats' idea of fighting fear with failure—Bush's failure. New polls show his approval ratings in the dismal low 40s, with strong majorities believing he has failed on every score except keeping the country safe. (A majority of those polled not surprisingly support Bush on eavesdropping on terror suspects domestically. So do I. But when the constitutional questions are raised, his numbers drop.) To confront the security issue, Wesley Clark is chairing a PAC to help the nine Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans running for Congress as Democrats (versus one as a Republican). The idea is to adopt the Rovean strategy of attacking your opponent's strength.

Will it work? In recent years, failure and incompetence have been trounced by fear at the ballot box. The former is based on reason and an examination of the facts; the latter on emotion, with 9/11 as a trump card. But now reality may be making a comeback, as Bush's authority breaks into a million little pieces.

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

While violent crime has been at historic lows nationwide and in cities like New York, Miami and Los Angeles, it is rising sharply here and in many other places across the country.

And while such crime in the 1990's was characterized by battles over gangs and drug turf, the police say the current rise in homicides has been set off by something more bewildering: petty disputes that hardly seem the stuff of fistfights, much less gunfire or stabbings.

Suspects tell the police they killed someone who "disrespected" them or a family member, or someone who was "mean mugging" them, which the police loosely translate as giving a dirty look. And more weapons are on the streets, giving people a way to act on their anger.

Police Chief Nannette H. Hegerty of Milwaukee calls it "the rage thing."

"We're seeing a very angry population, and they don't go to fists anymore, they go right to guns," she said. "A police department can have an effect on drugs or gangs. But two people arguing in a home, how does the police department go in and stop that?"

Here in Milwaukee, where homicides jumped from 88 in 2004 to 122 last year, the number classified as arguments rose to 45 from 17, making up by far the largest category of killings, as gang and drug murders declined.

In Houston, where homicides rose 24 percent last year, disputes were by far the largest category, 113 out of 336 killings. Officials were alarmed by the increase in murders well before Hurricane Katrina swelled the city's population by 150,000 people in September; the police say 18 homicides were related to evacuees.

In Philadelphia, where 380 homicides made 2005 the deadliest year since 1997, 208 were disputes; drug-related killings, which accounted for about 40 percent of homicides during the high-crime period of the early 1990's, accounted for just 13 percent.

"When we ask, 'Why did you shoot this guy?' it's, 'He bumped into me,' 'He looked at my girl the wrong way,' " said Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson of Philadelphia. "It's not like they're riding around doing drive-by shootings. It's arguments — stupid arguments over stupid things."

The police say the suspects and the victims tend to be black, young — midteens to mid-20's — and have previous criminal records. They tend to know each other. Several cities said that domestic violence had also risen. And the murders tend to be limited to particular neighborhoods. Downtown Milwaukee has not had a homicide in about five years, but in largely black neighborhoods on the north side, murders rose from 57 in 2004 to 94 last year.

"We're not talking about a city, we're talking about this subpopulation, that's what drives everything," said David M. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "When they calm down, all the numbers go down. When they heat up, all the numbers go up. They hurt each other over personal stuff. It's respect and disrespect, and it's girls."

While arguments have always made up a large number of homicides, the police say the trigger point now comes faster.

"Traditionally, you could see the beef growing and maybe hitting the volatile point," said Daniel Coleman, the commander of the homicide unit in Boston. "Now we see these things, they're flashes, they're very unpredictable. Even five years ago, in what started as a fight or dispute, maybe you'd have a knife shown. Now it's an automatic default to a firearm."

In robberies, Milwaukee's Chief Hegerty said, "even after the person gives up, the guy with the gun shoots him anyway. We didn't have as much of that before."

Homicide rates are driven by different factors in each city, but even cities whose rates have fallen have seen problems with disputes, though those disputes are often about drugs or gangs. "As the murder universe continues to shrink in New York, the common denominators remain consistent," said Police Department Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne. "In most instances, killers and victims knew each other, each had criminal records, and they were engaged in disputes, usually over narcotics."

Nationally, the homicide rate peaked in 1991, declined steadily after 1993 and has remained essentially flat since 1999. But in the first six months of 2005, according to preliminary statistics from the F.B.I., the number of homicides nationwide rose 2.1 percent, with the greatest increase, 4.9 percent, in the Midwest.

Yet many cities have seen far steeper increases. In Boston and San Francisco the number of homicides last year was at its highest in a decade, and in Prince George's County, Md., outside Washington, it was the highest ever.

In St. Louis, the number of homicides rose to 131 last year from 113 in 2004. Tulsa had 64 murders, 2 more than in 1993. Charlotte jumped from a record low of 60 homicides in 2004 to 85 in 2005. And the murder rate for 2005 was above the 15-year average in Kansas City, Mo., and Nashville.

A large part of the problem, the police say, is simply more guns on the streets as gun laws have loosened around the country. In Philadelphia, Commissioner Johnson said, since the state made it easier to get a gun permit in 1985, the number of people authorized to carry a gun in the city has risen from 700 to 32,000.

But the police also blame lax sentences and judges who they say let suspects out on bail too easily. Here, Deputy Chief Brian O'Keefe recalled a man who was released from prison on an armed robbery conviction after two years, with five years' probation, and killed someone within three months. In Nashville, Chief Ronal W. Serpas recalled an 18-year-old who had been arrested 41 times but was out on bail when he killed a bystander in a fight over a dice game.

"We have people who've done two, three, four, five shootings who are back on the streets," said Kathleen M. O'Toole, Boston's police commissioner. "Unless we have bail reform, unless these impact players with multiple gun arrests are kept off the streets, we won't reverse this problem."

Still, some of the problems are hard to address with tougher laws.

The neighborhoods with the most murders tend to be the poorest. In Milwaukee, Mallory O'Brien, an epidemiologist brought in to direct the new homicide review commission, said suspects and victims tend to have been born to teenage mothers. The city has one of the nation's highest teen pregnancy rates for blacks, and among black men, one of the lowest high school graduation rates. An industrial base that used to provide jobs for those without a high school diploma has shrunk.

Chief Corwin of Kansas City said that in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, people had explained it as a "lack of hope." "If I don't have skills, I don't have training, my socioeconomic situation looks desperate, do I really have hope?" he said. "I think that ties into the anger. If the only thing I have is my respect, that's what I carry on the street. If someone disrespects me, they've done the ultimate to me."

Those who study crime debate whether the cities where homicide is rising represent a trend.

"It's a couple of cities with bad luck and with local problems which are very real, but not necessarily part of a national pattern," said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at Berkeley who is writing a book on the crime drop of the late 1990's.

But Mr. Kennedy, at John Jay, said the decrease in homicides in big cities has obscured the problem in many other places.

"In many places — both cities and increasingly suburban and rural settings — things never got as good as they did nationally," he said. "Even if things got better, they didn't get as better as they did in Los Angeles or New York. In many places, they're getting worse."

Certainly, the number of homicides is lower than its peak in the early 90's — Milwaukee had 168 killings, not including Jeffrey Dahmer's serial murders, in 1991. But the number is far higher than in recent years, and alarming to a public that has gotten used to good news. Boston, which peaked with 151 murders in 1990, had declined to 31 in 1999. Nashville in 2004 had its lowest homicide rate in the history of city government, with 58 murders, before jumping to 99 last year.

"Because for this decade the sense is that crime is down, it's very hard to speak out about it and not look as though you're doing something wrong," said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a research and public policy group in Washington. "People's expectation of crime has significantly changed."

In some of the cities, overall crime has declined, thanks to a significant drop in property crimes. But the rise in homicides and robberies causes alarm.

"It's hard for people to look at it in depth and understand that they're not likely to be a victim if they get along with their family members and neighbors and don't live a high-risk lifestyle," said Darrel Stephens, the police chief in Charlotte.

Cities say they are going after illegal guns and are trying to stop disputes from becoming homicides. Kansas City used to investigate only some aggravated assaults; now it follows up on all cases, on the theory that next time, the assault might be a homicide. Boston and Philadelphia are sweeping neighborhoods for people who have violated warrants. In St. Louis, the police have put cameras in high-crime neighborhoods and have sent gang units to talk to parents of chronically truant students.

But recognizing that the problems have deep roots, cities are also going beyond traditional law enforcement, trying to involve churches, schools and social service agencies. In Boston, the neighborhood sweeps are followed by work crews that repair potholes, trim trees and remove graffiti.

Here in Milwaukee, the police are tagging "M.V.P.'s," or major violent players — people with several arrests, who are more likely to be involved in arguments and homicides, according to Ms. O'Brien's analysis. Those names are announced at daily police briefings.

The city has also put prosecutors and probation and parole officers on patrol with police officers, because they have more immediate power to rein in chronic offenders by enforcing curfew, nuisance laws, and restrictions against alcohol or drug use and association with gang members.

The homicide review commission has frequent, formal meetings with corrections officers, prosecutors and social service agencies to identify problem families, and is meeting with schools to assess what they are teaching about conflict resolution and how to reduce truancy.

Next month, police officials say, they will have the first of several town hall meetings with the neighborhoods with the highest homicide rates, to get residents' ideas on how to stop the killings.

"We didn't get here in a day," said Ms. O'Brien, the epidemiologist. "There's no simple solution."

The fight erupted at a housing dorm where 86 black and Hispanic inmates were separated by race, sheriff's spokesman Deputy Luis Castro said. Guards fired sting balls at the inmates to break up the riot. No deputies were hurt.

Dozens of inmates have been injured and one killed since clashes between Hispanic and black inmates began Feb. 4 at the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, about 40 miles outside Los Angeles.

Small brawls followed throughout the week, including a Friday fight among 73 inmates that took an hour to quell.

The latest rioting took place despite a lockdown of all 19,000 inmates in the Los Angeles County jail system.

"I wouldn't call anybody a suspect at this time," Copher said.

Tonya Hawks, 31, and her three sons, ages 2, 4 and 5, had moved into the rented house last summer. The bodies were found in various locations in the house and appeared to have been dead for several days, Copher said.

"The house was secure. Nothing would suggest that it was an intruder," he said. "It didn't appear there was a struggle or anything."

Copher declined to say where or how many times they were shot, and would not release the names of the boyfriend, the boys or their fathers.

Concerned neighbors had called Clay Township police because they saw no activity for four days, and the house remained dark even though the family's car was parked outside.

While police were on the way, a woman looked in the window and saw one of the boys lying still. Another neighbor kicked in the door, thinking the boy needed help, Copher said.

"That's when they saw there was blood," said Janet Naylor, a next-door neighbor in the one-stoplight bedroom community on a two-lane highway.

Naylor said the family was quiet and friendly. The boys were well-mannered and played in her front yard, greeting adults in the neighborhood with, "Hi, neighbor!"

"It's your worst nightmare," Naylor said. "They were just so funny."

About three dozen police had surrounded the apartment building where the last two inmates had holed up. One of the men faced armed robbery charges and the other was accused of aggravated kidnaping and attempting escape from a courthouse; they talked intermittently with police negotiators.

"They had nowhere to go," Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan said. "They were desperate but they weren't that desperate that they'd try to run."

A third fugitive, who was charged with murder, surrendered from the apartment late Saturday, bringing two of the young children with him.

Officers also led out the woman in handcuffs and took the last child from the apartment. Authorities said all five children were placed in the custody of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

Two other inmates were captured Sunday about 7 miles from the jail in Oak Park. Another inmate was arrested Sunday evening, said Chicago police spokeswoman JoAnn Taylor.

The men escaped from a special unit for inmates with disciplinary problems. One guard was on duty instead of three because of staffing shortages, said county Sheriff's Department spokesman Bill Cunningham.

One inmate threw hot water from a shower on the guard and held him at bay with a homemade knife, then handcuffed the guard and put on his uniform, officials said.

That inmate was immediately caught after opening doors to let the other six inmates out. They got over a barbed wire fence and onto the streets.

On Friday, an inmate facing armed robbery charges broke out by apparently slipping into a laundry truck. He was arrested Saturday at a suburban motel, authorities said.