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The day I sat down with Elijah Anderson to talk about violence, police in Colorado Springs, Colo., were blaming a rise in local thuggery on rap music.

The professor let out a laugh. Talk about your usual suspects - in the last two weeks, authorities have dragged hip-hop culture into lineups from Madison, Wis., to Lee County, Fla., in an attempt to understand what's going wrong in their towns.

What's really going on, the sociologist says, isn't so easy to assign to songs that glorify a gangsta life.

Anderson, who left Penn for Yale this summer, conducts ethnographic field studies. That's a fancy way of saying he finds a place that interests him, then spends long hours observing, interviewing, absorbing, and analyzing what he's seen.

Thirty years ago he made his mark with A Place on the Corner, a study of Jelly's barroom on Chicago's South Side. But it was 1999's Code of the Street that caused me to seek him out. Based on families he followed along Germantown Avenue, the book probes the attitudes of inner-city youth, both "decent" kids and "street kids."

Shaded from the blazing sun, we sat for a few hours on a bench in Chestnut Hill, where Anderson delivered a short course in the sociology of violence.

He began with the underlying problems - poverty, alienation, racism - each deep-rooted, and worsened by a changing economy that shifts jobs away from U.S. cities, away from the poorly schooled and badly trained.

But he kept coming back to street cred.

Locked out and loaded If you feel the police and courts aren't serving you, "you have to settle disputes on the streets," he said. "And your reputation for vengeance and payback becomes very important. It's very important to keep your sister safe, keep your mother safe, keep your boys safe.

"If you don't have that, the assumption is that people will roll on you - they will try you."

One reason for Philadelphia's runaway murder rate is that street cred is high-maintenance.

"You can't get it for once and for all. That's why these disputes, which to outsiders are so meaningless, are so consequential. A person can get killed for taking a parking space."

People in the communities Anderson studies talk about two types of people - "decent" and "street." Even the decent have a hard time resisting the call of the street.

Being a good student - a Poindexter - is no advantage in the 'hood. And going to college only taints your street reputation. "College boys come home, and the street boys ask them, 'Can you still hang?' "

Anderson bridged a few worlds of his own growing up. The son of a domestic and a factory worker, he was a precocious reader who worked from the time he turned 12 and walked the streets of South Bend, Ind., asking every shop owner for a job.

He got one at a typewriter store and worked there until graduation from high school, where he played halfback, but was a step too slow to win a scholarship. He studied sociology at Indiana, then Chicago and Northwestern.

A bit of a Poindexter?

"I was on my way to being one," he says with a smile, "but I straightened out."

Getting any job is not so easy these days, he says, and not just because there isn't much call for typewriter repair.

"There is a stereotype of the inner-city, poor, young black male. A lot of employers don't want to take a chance on him. There's a bias against him - even kids who are 'decent' have a lot of trouble. You go to a lot of restaurants, and you don't see black people working on the wait staff. It's almost segregated. It's different in the kitchen."

Hoping for hope What's needed, he said, is "a strong sense of future. Without that, everything is about here and now, 'cuz tomorrow ain't promised to you."

Which makes me wonder what he thinks the next mayor faces.

"You've got to have a sense there is something there for you, gives you incentive, motivation for the long view, to get rid of the short fuse. That's the challenge for [the mayor] and the business people."

Whoever leads Philadelphia, he says, must appreciate that the economic shifts have left one in four Philadelphians living below the poverty line (making $20,444 a year for a family of four.)

"That's a heavy statistic. It screams for economic development, investment. We need jobs, jobs, jobs. We need to be encouraging the development of jobs that pay a decent wage."

I asked him if he's pessimistic. He said he's hopeful.

Anderson keeps coming back to Philly, his home of three decades, to research a book about how we deal with race and diversity in everyday life. He's expanding on themes he explored in a 2004 article that celebrated the way people get along at places like the Reading Terminal Market, where strangers of all walks are open to encounters.

He called the market "the cosmopolitan canopy," providing cover for city dwellers trying to connect with others.

"It may be," he said, "that the canopy is our salvation as a society."