Soon after Cincinnati unleashed a crime-fighting campaign that enlists clergy, community leaders and police to quell gang gunplay, it was hailed a success. Now the tough approach -- the template for a Pittsburgh program -- appears to be losing steam.

In the months after the launch of the Cincinnati campaign, known criminals started asking cops about the crackdown. Others, getting the message, would call police after killings to let them know they had nothing to do with it.

Homicides among the group of "corner-hanging, gun-toting criminals" who were the targets of the program dropped dramatically, said Lt. Col. James Whalen, Cincinnati's patrol bureau commander.

"We were looking like heroes for a while," he said. "Now, the numbers are creeping back up."

About 18 months since the program kicked in, Cincinnati's homicides are outpacing last year's, and the city has seen "an uptick in gun and violent crime," a sign, he said, that the program is losing steam.

Similar initiatives have also proved hard to sustain and have faded in several other cities that have tried them, raising questions about how long Pittsburgh's budding program could survive.

"Things like this come in, and everyone jumps on the bandwagon," said the Rev. Sheldon Stoudemire, a street minister who does outreach in Pittsburgh's crime-weary neighborhoods. "Two or three months wears off, and it's back to business as usual."

City leaders say they're committed to the far-reaching program, which aims to send a message to the city's 500 to 1,000 violent criminals through social services, the full force of law enforcement and community pressure. Officials have dedicated $200,000 to bring the nontraditional approach here. Mayor Luke Ravenstahl discussed the initiative in a Tuesday appearance.

The initiative is complex. It starts by rounding up the city's toughest troublemakers, many of whom are on probation or parole and can be compelled to attend "call-in sessions," where grieving mothers, neighborhood elders, ex-gangsters and police will tell them enough is enough.

Police will tell them that their next killing could land their entire posse behind bars, with sentences at prisons in far-away cities if they keep fighting.

Then, social services will offer an "honorable exit" through tutoring or other opportunities for those who want them. It's designed to be a carrot-and-stick promise to gangsters: stop shooting or it's off to prison.

Gang violence is "an obvious problem" in the city, Assistant Chief Maurita Bryant said, though it's unknown, she added, exactly how much of this year's gun crimes can be attributed to the loosely organized groups. But they have been at the helm of the some of this year's most shocking slayings, including the shooting of 12-year-old Jolesa Barber, killed when gunmen fired 40 rounds into her sister's North Side rowhouse, and that of 15-year-old Ernest Tolliver, shot to death while he and his mother were at the drive-through of a Homewood Kentucky Fried Chicken. Shortly after their January deaths, police said there were about 40 gangs with about 875 members on Pittsburgh's streets.

With 60 homicides this year, the city is on pace to surpass the decade's worst year -- 2003, when 74 were killed.

"[The Pittsburgh Initiative to Reduce Crime] is probably the best idea that has come up in quite some time," Chief Bryant said.

She and other officials repeatedly point to the success of the program in Boston in the mid-1990s, where it is credited for slashing homicides by 70 percent. By 1999, four years after Boston police started Operation Ceasefire, there were just 31 homicides, down from a record of 152 in 1990.

Residents called it the "Boston Miracle."

But by 2000, Operation Ceasefire began to unravel, as police started to focus their attention elsewhere and key brass transferred to other departments, according to a study released this summer by researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

As the plan began to fade, police failed to notice that gang slayings were increasing yearly, even though the overall number of homicides was low, the report says. A group of black clergy members, who served as a mechanism for accountability and trust in the minority community and gave the strategy its legitimacy, were "surprisingly ill-prepared to deal with a new cycle of gang violence," according to the study. Both police and the ministers, it says, "suffered from a lack of strategic focus on disrupting conflicts among high-risk youth."

By 2005, the number of killings had reached a 10-year high.

Despite the unraveling, the study notes, Boston police and clergy jump-started Operation Ceasefire again in 2006 and "both seem to be appropriately focused on community-based violence prevention."

Cincinnati saw 68 killings in 2007, down from 89 the previous year. It was the largest single-year decline in homicides since 1991. In the six-month period after the program started, gang-related homicides fell 61 percent compared to the same time-period the previous year, according to the University of Cincinnati's Policing Institute. The city wants to keep its program alive.

"The strength of the framework is clearly that it is very effective," said the program's architect, Professor David Kennedy, of the City University of New York. "The weakness is that it is complicated, and it has a lot of moving parts. It is difficult to sustain."

The long-term success of the program, Dr. Kennedy said, depends on a "genuine commitment" from law enforcement, social services and community, namely church leaders.

Cincinnati's Lt. Col. Whalen said it depends on social services and police sticking to their respective promises of help or harsh punishment. This isn't a "hug-a-thug" approach, he said, a term coined by skeptics who say offering gang members a chance at reform is being too soft on hardened criminals.

"You need to get in [gang members'] heads, and you need to make them believe that you're credible, that the services people can really do what they're offering to do, and that law enforcement can really do what they say they will do," he said.

Chief Bryant said she's confident the agencies in the program will stay committed to sustaining it long-term, once they see signs that it's working.

"I'm cautiously optimistic," said District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. "It's going to be a difficult task."

The Pittsburgh Initiative to Reduce Crime is reminiscent of countless other efforts in the city to combat gang and gun violence, which had varying degrees of success. Some, such as a violent crimes task force out of Mr. Zappala's office, are large-scale. Others, such as Adrienne Young's Tree of Hope, are grass-roots efforts formed in the wake of tragedy.

Ms. Young started Tree of Hope, which counsels families of victims of violence, after her son, Javon Thompson, was gunned down in a gang-related robbery in 1994. Since then she has seen the ebb and flow of crime initiatives in the city, but, she said, violence persists.

Ms. Young said she is hopeful -- but skeptical -- that the new initiative will offer long-lasting results.

"It has to be consistent, and has to be in-your-face, and it has to be where we're totally committed to it," she said. "They can't just come in and make a splash and make the TV and the papers and walk away, which has happened to us before. When the smoke clears, we've still got dead children."