The Public Eye

By MARGARET CARLSON

"Stop the shooter!" shouts the man with the blue bandanna around his head. There's a cop nearby, but he makes no move on the 6-ft. 3-in. teenager who is taking aim. That's because the patrolman is one of about 75 spectators who have dropped by for an Under the Stars basketball game -- and the shooter simply wants to sink a basket. Every Tuesday and Thursday night inside Dunbar High School gym -- 12 blocks from the Capitol and five from one of Washington's most notorious drug markets -- the only shots the police have to worry about are lay-ups and free throws.

Somehow, though, midnight basketball has become the laugh line of the crime bill. It has come to stand for all that is wrong with liberals and their woolly talk about "root causes." The criteria set out to define communities eligible for funds -- those with a high incidence of joblessness, illegitimacy, AIDS and crime -- have been parodied as requiring teams to be made up of HIV-positive, drug-taking pregnant dropouts. And the very name doesn't help. At midnight all the good kids are supposed to be in bed, and anyone who isn't should not be coddled with giveaways. More curfews will do the job and they cost nothing, the critics say. What the ridicule of midnight basketball shows is how mindlessly partisan Congress has become. For the most part Republicans were in favor of the crime bill -- including Subtitle F, called Midnight Sports. That was before they realized that they could recapture the law-and-order issue for themselves by stalling the bill. Suddenly the G.O.P. and conservative think tanks -- even Charlton Heston, speaking for the National Rifle Association -- were all over it. Instead of putting 100,000 police officers on the street, they said, the crime bill would fund only 20,000; it would create more social workers than cops; it would also release 10,000 drug dealers.

All those allegations are untrue. The bill funds 75% of salary and benefits for 50,000 new police officers by the year 2000, with local funds providing the remaining 25%. Moreover, $7 of every $10 in the bill goes toward law enforcement and prison construction. As for the release of drug dealers, judges would be required to review the mandatory minimum sentences and free less egregious criminals -- probably 400 at most -- to make room for truly violent offenders.

Before civility in politics completely broke down, George Bush gave midnight basketball the Republican imprimatur. In 1991 he visited the first such league, in Glenarden, Maryland. "The last thing midnight basketball is about is basketball," President Bush said at the time. "It's about providing opportunity for young adults to escape drugs and the streets and get on with their lives. It's not coincidental that the crime rate is down 60% since this program began."

The program has grown to serve about 10,000 kids in 50 cities. Says David Mitchell, police chief of Prince George's County in Maryland: "You hook them with basketball with all the trappings -- in a gym with referees and uniforms and a tournament -- and then you teach them lots of other things as well." However, expanding this proven crime stopper to the many thousands of kids who want to join will take more than a patchwork of volunteer coaches, county recreation programs and local businesses to pay for the referees, bus drivers, utilities, uniforms and equipment. The money in the bill -- $5 million in 1996, rising to $10 million in 2000 -- sounds like a lot. But remember: it costs at least $20,000 to lock up one person in prison for a single year.