With contracting and funding problems apparently behind it, the Pittsburgh Initiative to Reduce Crime is finally ready to kick into high gear, officials said yesterday.

Following a City Council vote yesterday, Public Safety Director Michael Huss said that anti-gang guru David M. Kennedy will be in Pittsburgh before month's end, helping city police craft a "map" of relationships among city "thugs." A stop-shooting-or-else meeting with gang members is "probably two months away," he said.

That's none too soon for Councilman Ricky Burgess, who has championed the initiative and tried to break bureaucratic logjams that have hampered it since its September 2008 announcement.

"I cannot improve the quality of life in my communities until the violence is abated," Mr. Burgess said.

The program is modeled on Mr. Kennedy's work in Boston and dozens of other cities. The plan is to identify networks of violent criminals, confront them with community disapproval, offer help to those who want to go straight and crack down on groups that continue to commit violent crimes.

Mr. Kennedy, of the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is to work with University of Pittsburgh researchers. But a proposed contract between the city and Pitt went back and forth between lawyers, and the city spent the $200,000 allocated for the program on other public safety costs.

The contract was recently signed. Yesterday, council voted to shift $200,000 from an account for fuel, which is flush due to a drop in fuel costs, for use on anti-gang program. Mr. Burgess initially circulated a petition to shift funds from the budget for a just-opened youth curfew center, but that proposal was nixed.

Mr. Huss said the city has had a drop in homicides -- from 61 by mid-October last year to 35 this year -- but that the administration is committed to driving that down further.

He said that the city's coordinator for the program, Jay Gilmer, has been working for months on a web of social service providers to help gang members who want to join mainstream society.

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