"Midnight basketball"

Ah, memories.

The dissident Democrats provided the killer margin to an all-but-solid G.O.P. opposition, which in recent weeks had taken to denouncing the bill as a pork-barrel measure that included too many social-work incentives for activities such as midnight basketball and self-esteem counseling for inner- city kids. After it was voted down, Republican Gerald Solomon of New York danced on the grave. "This is a welfare bill with a few good things to cover it."

Beyond that, they opposed it for the simple reason that the President wanted it. Because it would have allowed them to present themselves as tough on crime, Democrats badly needed the bill for their re-election bids this fall. "Don't give it to them" was the message the Republican National Committee sent last week to 38 House Republicans who voted earlier this year in favor of the provision banning assault weapons. Each received a copy of a resolution that the Alaska branch of the party had put before the G.O.P.'s recent national meeting in Los Angeles. It called upon the Republican National Committee to deny campaign funds to the 38 dissenters. Though the resolution had not been voted on, it was enough for the party leadership to draw it to the dissidents' attention -- much as the commander of a firing squad might blandly direct his prisoners to notice that line of rifles over there. Nineteen changed their votes.

Yes, "welfare" for inner-city kids -- Republicans derided it as the worst of welfare and pork barrel spending.

Except that it seems to have worked.

The murder rate among black teenagers has climbed since 2000 even as murders by young whites have scarcely grown or declined in some places, according to a new report.

The celebrated reduction in murder rates nationally has concealed a “worrisome divergence,” said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University who wrote the report, to be released Monday, with Marc L. Swatt. And there are signs, they said, that the racial gap will grow without countermeasures like restoring police officers in the streets and creating social programs for poor youths.

The main racial difference involves juveniles ages 14 to 17. In 2000, 539 white and 851 black juveniles committed murder, according to an analysis of federal data by the authors. In 2007, the number for whites, 547, had barely changed, while that for blacks was 1,142, up 34 percent.

The increase coincided with a rise in the number of murders involving guns, Dr. Fox said. The number of young blacks who were victims of murder also rose in this period.

Murder rates around the country are far below the record highs of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a crack epidemic spawned violent turf battles.

“Regrettably, as the nation celebrated the successful fight against violent crime in the 1990s, we grew complacent and eased up on our crime-fighting efforts,” the authors said.

The report primarily blames cutbacks in federal support for community policing and juvenile crime prevention, reduced support for after-school and other social programs, and a weakening of gun laws. Cuts in these areas have been felt most deeply in poor, black urban areas, helping to explain the growing racial disparity in violent crime, Dr. Fox said.

But Bruce Western, a sociologist at Harvard, cautioned that the change in murder rates was not large and did not yet show a clear trend. Dr. Western also said that the impact of the reduction in government spending on crime control would have to be studied on a city-by-city basis, and that many other changes, including a sagging economy, could have affected murder rates.

Conservative criminologists place greater emphasis on the breakdown of black families, rather than cuts in government programs, in explaining the travails of black youths.

Of course they do. But that's the point. The breakdown in black families is precisely the reason for these programs. We can blame inner city blacks for the trend and ignore it -- the conservative approach, i.e., "Let God sort em out" -- or we can, as unemployment rises in our cities as well as our suburbs, fund programs for strapped cities that might actually work and save some lives.