Shootings through Aug. 26 were up 5.2 percent compared with the same period in 2011; the number of shooting victims is on the rise, up 6.1 percent, to 1,166.

It is so easy to demand that the police do more, but that’s silliness. For 20 years, the police and mayors have tightened gun laws and labored to remove semiautomatics and AK-47s, often called slammers. But the flood tide of armaments keeps running in.

Dub City, Hood Starz, 280, Wave Gang — the members of these gangs are so many Billy the Kids in do-rags, posting YouTube videos of beat-downs and sending texts like this intercepted by the police last week: “I just cop dis slammer and dyin’ to use it.”

And too many parents embrace cluelessness like an old friend.

That was not the reality for Matt and Kemar. “My daughter Princess called me Sergeant Strict,” Ms. Shaw-Leary says. “I still set the Cinderella curfew for the older ones: You’re in by midnight or I’m calling you.”

Ms. Shaw-Leary is a Jamaica-born force of nature, her black curls surrounding a mouth that can light up like a many-megawatt beacon. She laid down a rule for her seven children: No marriages and no children before you get a college degree. Her next youngest, Princess, is working on a master’s at Fordham.

In wintertime, Ms. Shaw-Leary patted her sons’ coats. “I like stop-and-frisk,” she says. “I stop and frisk my own kids! I tell Matt, ‘If a police officer stops you, don’t get macho. They are doing their jobs.’ ”

She leads me to his room, where his SpongeBob doll sits near his favorite gold sneakers. She keeps his television on, tuned to “Sports Center” on ESPN.