Whatever happened to the ``Boston miracle''?

Youth workers, academics and law enforcement officials agree the anti-violence successes of the 1990s have been set back in 2003 - as the deaths of five teens below the age of 16 so far this year attest.

But they do not agree on why.

``I see a kind of withdrawal from the overall violence prevention activity,'' said Deborah Prothrow-Stith, associate dean of the Harvard School of Public Health.

``Not so much consciously,'' she said, ``but a kind of complacency that has led to tolerance for cuts in summer jobs and other programs.''

But Kenneth D. Johnson, director of the Ella J. Baker House in Dorchester, a youth center, said the problem is simpler: numbers.

``There's a larger number of teenagers in the city now than a decade ago,'' he said. ``And as the numbers get larger, the numbers of kids getting into trouble or being victimized gets larger, too.''

Boston Redevelopment Authority statistics, which in 2002 identified a ``marked increase'' in the 5-17 Hub age group, support Johnson.

From 1990 to 2000, the BRA reports, that group grew from 74,000 to 85,000. And in parts of Dorchester, Mattapan and Roxbury, city figures show, the population of 5- to 17-year-olds exceeds 33 percent.

Johnson said major demographic trends indicate the population of 8- to 15-year-olds in Boston will not peak until 2006, making early outreach all the more vital now.

``A lot of the groups that were out there in the '90s are still on the street and still deep in the communities,'' he said. ``But they have far fewer resources to work with.''

One city law enforcement official intimately familiar with youth crime, who asked not to be identified by name, said the shootings of teens is part of an alarming trend Boston must come to grips with.

``This is the era of the super-predator, plain and simple,'' he said. ``There are kids out there you are just not going to get to.

``They were born to crack addicts or with fetal-alcohol syndrome and their fathers have been away in jail all their lives,'' he said. ``This has nothing to do with complacency or a lack of effort on the street, where the rubber meets the road. They are just impervious.''

But David Kennedy, a criminal justice specialist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, argues in a National Institute of Justice evaluation that Boston abandoned a pivotal antigang program called ``Operation Ceasefire.''

Under that program, gang members were identified by police officers, street workers, urban ministers and others, and repeatedly ordered to meet face to face with a ``youth violence strike force.''

The strike force ``used intensive order maintenance and enforcement to quickly suppress flareups . . . in gang hotspots,'' Kennedy reported, adding that ``such `retail deterrence' worked immediately.''

Whatever the reasons, Howard Spivak of Tufts University's Center for Children warned, ``I think there's an attitude that it's better and we can relax on our laurels, and that is a serious mistake.''