MANCHESTER, Conn.

After three fatal shootings of young men in New Haven in less than two weeks, Mayor Justin Elicker gave news interviews to assure people that downtown is safe for holiday shopping, dining, and other festive activities. The mayor noted that, as with murders and shootings in other cities, most in New Haven involve people who know each other.

That is, no harm is likely to come to people visiting New Haven as long as they don't know anyone there. As for New Haven residents themselves, most figure that they'll probably be OK as long as they're not young men or associating with young men.

Essentially the mayor was saying that the mayhem is just a problem of the underclass. He noted that city social workers and police officers are pressing New Haven's young men to control their impulses to violence and change their dissolute lifestyle. Good luck with that.

Of course few if any elective offices are more difficult than mayor of an impoverished city, and Elicker was trying to protect New Haven's image. But outsiders should  worry about the urban underclass. For the policies that created and sustain it and concentrate it in the cities are  state and national policies, not city policies, and they are disgracefully  designed  to discourage people from worrying about the underclass, designed to let people think that it's the natural order for young men in the cities to be killing and maiming each other.

What are these policies? 

They extend far beyond exclusive suburban zoning, which at least Connecticut's political left dares to challenge.

These policies begin with the destruction of poor families with welfare subsidies for childbearing outside marriage. Such subsidies proclaim that no one needs to be prepared  to support one's own children and that fathers aren't needed anymore, though fatherlessness correlates heavily with bad outcomes for children, especially boys. Most children in Connecticut's cities live without fathers.

These policies continue with the repeal of standards in education and their replacement with social promotion, thereby destroying the incentive to learn for children who lack prepared and competent parents. Education is mostly a matter of parenting; without well-parented students who accept an obligation to learn, schools can't accomplish much. So government in Connecticut pretends that education is all about teacher salaries and busies itself with raises instead. 

But having grown the underclass so large, government lacks the courage necessary even to recognize the disaster it has created. 

What politicians will try to fix the problem of family destruction when it means telling so many of their constituents -- in the cities,  most  of their constituents -- that they should not have responded to the damaging incentives government gave them? 

What politicians will try to restore education when it means telling educators, the most pernicious special interest, that it is a fraud for them to advance uneducated students from grade to grade and then to graduate them when the kids are unprepared to do more than menial work and to be citizens, and that this fraud leads them to demoralization and crime?

Destruction of educational standards worsened in last month's election. At the urging of its teacher unions, Massachusetts voted at referendum to repeal its requirement that high school students pass a proficiency test to graduate. The test was accused of racism for being too difficult for minority students, but it wasn't racist. The racism is the welfare system's depriving those students of fathers.

Connecticut doesn't dare attempt a high school graduation test or any proficiency test of high school seniors, lest the public discover that the huge amounts spent in the name of education produce so little and that most graduates never master high school work.

How can people raised in the welfare system and delivered to adulthood so uneducated be expected to support themselves? They can't. Hence the desire for state government to appropriate more and more to subsidize people who can't take care of themselves and their kids -- more food, day care, medical care, housing subsidies, and such.

So Connecticut's underclass keeps growing -- and shooting itself.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).