Another shooting in Lancaster, this time outside the Blue Star. This, on the heels of this story I wrote for our newspaper this weekend, pointing out that violence is up in both the city and the county. But of course, we’re comparing apples and oranges.

The violence in the county, in one way, is scarier. Because for the most part it’s random, or seems to be. Diener, Nickel Mines - the jury still out on the Haines murders, though it seems likely that it was a targeted murder; random psychos don’t generally wander around neighborhoods trying doors to see what’s unlocked. Though I suppose stranger things have happened.

The situation in the city is different, grimmer, more intractable. Police chief Sam Gatchell said last week that if you’re not involved in gangs or drugs, the chances of you being involved in a shooting are low; the violence in Lancaster is simply not random. But there are a lot of people involved in gangs and drugs. They are of a younger generation that is very quick to settle disputes with firearms. A co-worker who lives in an increasingly drug-infested neighborhood says the bad guys on her block simply are not afraid of the police.

So what to do? In this thread regarding last week’s print edition, usedmeat makes an excellent point: You get the policing you pay for. That’s not to denigrate the cops; rather, it is to say that in Lancaster, by anyone’s measure, there are too few police officers, perhaps far too few. This, at a time when I’m told several grants that allowed the department to hire more cops over the past few years are about to run out. Meaning there soon may be even fewer police.

But while we might agree the city needs more officers, where’s the money coming from? City taxpayers? Not bloody likely. Or maybe people in the county would be willing to pay a special tax to hire city officers. Not on your life.

So we’ll scrounge for state and federal dollars, but that will only provide limited success. Meanwhile, some of the other things we could be doing will also go undone because there isn’t the money for it. In recent months I’ve wondered why there aren’t any police substations in some of the city’s more troubled neighborhoods - you know, precinct houses where cops are on duty all the time, when they can respond in quicker fashion to trouble in the immediate neighborhood. Manor Street would be an ideal spot for a substation. But who’s going to pay for it? If we don’t have enough cops on the beat now, how in the world would we staff substations?

Lancaster City needs significant sources of new revenue, and needs it now. That’s hardly news, every school district and municipality in the county could and would say the same thing. But we, as a society, are unable to come up with any new sources of revenue; the ones we do come up with - see slots in Pennsylvania - are always by nature going to be controversial. Ultimately, though, we will be forced to swallow our compunctions because we so desperately need the revenue. We simply have no choice.

What neither police nor politicians can say is that crime in the city is out of control - in that, they are unable to prevent these shootings, the violence continues apace and that seems likely to persist for the foreseeable future. There are indeed attempts at structural change going on that might bear fruit down the road - but as for the Blue Star shooting, as for however many other shootings we may have this week, they won’t make a difference. The problem is now, there needs to be a solution now. I fear there isn’t.