It looks like Police Chief Cathy Lanier might have to go back to the drawing board.

After her new summer crime initiative enjoyed a successful rollout with a full-scale police deployment and a record number of weekend arrests two weeks back, this last weekend wasn’t nearly as peaceful. According to WJLA, four seperate shootings over a two-hour period on Saturday night and Sunday morning (two dead, two injured) forced Lanier to call a meeting today with her District Commanders to discuss how best to stem the usual summer spike in crime. Specifically, Lanier might have to look into more weekend-long mass deployments, instead of using them as one-time tools to set a tone for the summer months. Of course, should she start forcing officers to work more and more overtime, her crime strategy might start looking more and more like her predecessor’s much-hated crime emergencies — along with the consequent drops in police morale.

Obviously, a balance is needed. I’ve been happy to see more and more police in my neighborhood, both in cars and on bikes. I was also satisfied with the full-scale deployment, but thought Lanier’s decision to make it a one-time deal was misguided. After all, what type of tone do you set when you tell the city’s residents that the rest of the summer will be business as usual? We can’t expect the city’s 3,800 police officers to work every weekend until September, but we can expect that Lanier live up to her promise to more carefully assess where crimes happen, when they happen, who commits them and what measures would best deter them. What this last weekend proved is that crime follows the balloon effect — press down on one side, and another pops up in its place — and that one-time initiatives can’t pass as sustainable strategies.