    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [November 13, 1993]
    [Pages 1986-1991]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Community in Memphis
    November 13, 1993

        Thank you for that wonderful welcome. Thank you for your sign about
    NAFTA. I didn't give it to her, I promise. [Laughter] Reverend Whalum,
    it's wonderful to be in your church, and I thank you for hosting this
    townhall meeting. Last year Reverend Whalum accepted my invitation to
    come to Arkansas to the Governor's mansion and to meet with me about a
    number of the problems you'll be discussing today. And it's good to see
    him again. He came to my house, and I'm in his house now.
        I want to thank my good friend Harold Ford who started helping me in
    my quest to become President early and, long before that, worked with me
    to help reform the welfare laws to give people both the obligation to
    work and the opportunity to grow and thrive. And the two things go
    together, and I thank Harold Ford for that. I'm glad to be here with
    Congressman Clement and with Congressman Jim Cooper. I'm glad to see
    them both up here talking. I was especially glad to see Jim talking
    because he's going to come back and ask you for a promotion next year,
    and he needed to get warmed up here, and I like that. I'm glad our good
    friend Congressman Jefferson came all the way from New Orleans to be
    with us today. That was good. Mayor Morris, it's good to see you. And I
    saw Mayor Herenton earlier today.
        And I want to say a special word of thanks to my good friend
    Governor McWherter. I think he's one of the finest Governors in the
    country, and a person could never ask for a better friend. And I thank
    you. We were out in the wind at the airport announcing the support of
    several Members of Congress for the North American

    [[Page 1987]]

    Free Trade Agreement. And Congressman Jefferson from New Orleans, who
    didn't know Governor McWherter very well, looked at him and he said,
    ``You were probably a better Governor than Bill Clinton, and you're
    certainly a better windbreaker than he was.'' [Laughter]
        Let me say, too, you know, this town hall meeting was scheduled
    before I announced that I was coming here to speak to the annual
    convention of the Church of God in Christ. And Congressman Ford invited
    me to come by; I wanted to come. The leader of our office of drug policy
    and a member of my Cabinet, Lee Brown, is here, and he'll be speaking
    after I leave. I'm going to introduce him as I go. Lee was the police
    chief in Atlanta, in Houston, and in New York and really pioneered the
    development of community policing in our country and proved that if you
    not only had enough police officers but if you deployed them in the
    right way, you could actually prevent crime from occurring as well as
    catch criminals more quickly, and in preventing crime from occurring,
    you could build bridges in neighborhoods and put lives back together and
    put communities back together.
        So I want to implore you not to turn this into just a speechmaking
    event. This is a discussion of crime and violence as a public health
    issue. It affects you and your lives and the lives of your children. So
    when I go, you stay. Will you do that? I want you to be a part of this.
    This is important.
        I want you to know why this is such a big issue to me as an
    American, a husband, a father, as well as President. I got elected
    President on some very basic commitments. I said that I would try to get
    the economy going again. I said I would try to restore the middle class
    and give hope to the poor by rewarding work and supporting families. I
    said that I would try to bring the country together again, across the
    lines of region and income and race, so that we could work together to
    ensure a better future for everyone.
        Now, in the last 10 months we've worked hard largely on the economy,
    to get the deficit down, to keep inflation down, to get interest rates
    down. That means investment's up. I don't know, but I bet there are a
    lot of people in this room even who were able to refinance a home in the
    last year. Millions of Americans have done that and lowered their
    monthly payments. In the last 10 months the economy has produced more
    jobs in the private sector than in the previous 4 years.
        But we all know that's not enough, we have to do more. I came here
    to support the North American Free Trade Agreement today for a simple
    reason, and that is that our workers are becoming more productive and
    more competitive; they have to to survive in the world. But productivity
    means that the same person can produce more in the same or less time,
    right? So if fewer people are producing more stuff, the only way you can
    create more jobs and higher incomes is if you have more customers for
    the things you're producing.
        So that's very important; this trade agreement's important to me.
    But when you get through all of that, you have to come back to the fact
    that this country is going to have a very hard time making it unless we
    do something about this wave of crime and violence that's tearing the
    heart out of America. And it affects everybody who thinks they're not
    affected by it. It affects you in many ways by forcing you as taxpayers
    to pay a lot more money to put people in the penitentiary than you
    otherwise would. You know, this country now has a higher percentage of
    people in prison than any other country in the world. Do you know that?
    That's something we're number one in. And we know in spite of that, a
    lot of people get out before they should.
        It means that you pay more in health care. Why? Because this really
    is a public health problem. I have spent years studying the American
    health care system and trying to figure out why we spend 40 or 50
    percent more than anybody else on health care and we still can't figure
    out how to give health care to everybody. And I'll tell you one reason.
    One reason is that on any given night, our emergency rooms are filled
    with people who are cut up and shot, who don't have any health
    insurance, and the rest of us pay for it.
        Now, that's not the number one--we ought to be concerned about them
    and others; I don't mean that on a human level. But you just need to
    know that if you say to me 4 years from now, ``Mr. President, why
    haven't you brought our health care costs more in line with everybody
    else's and given health care to everybody?''--if you want the costs
    brought into line, we're going to have to stop shooting and cutting each
    other up so much. It's a big health care issue. You can't blame the
    doctors, and you can't

    [[Page 1988]]

    blame the hospitals, and you can't blame--even though I get crossways
    with them from time to time, this is not the insurance companies' fault.
    This is society. When people show up bleeding and shot, there they are.
    Right? So this is a huge public health problem.
        But more importantly, it's doing something just awful to our
    country. The other day I met with my good friend the Mayor of Baltimore,
    when I was up at Johns Hopkins Medical Center talking to them about our
    health care plan. And he told me that the night before he had had to
    visit a home of an 18-year-old boy who was a fine young man who went out
    every Halloween for years with real young kids so they could go trick-
    or-treating safely in the neighborhood. And they were walking down the
    street and crossed the street. There was a 14-year-old boy with a gun
    and a 13-year-old boy without one. And the 14-year-old handed the 13-
    year-old the gun and dared him to shoot across the street at the 18-
    year-old. And he did, and he killed him.
        That kind of stuff happens all the time. In our Nation's Capital the
    other day a man came along the street and grabbed up a little 1-year-old
    girl, put her in a seat beside him, and sped off in a car. And some
    people who were after him ran after him, started shooting. They shot him
    dead. The bullet went through his body and hit the little girl, went
    down through her foot, and blew her little bootie off. A 1-year-old
    child.
        In the Washington Post in our Nation's Capital the other day there
    was an article about children so convinced they would never grow up that
    at the age of 11, they were planning their funerals. Little girl saying,
    ``Well, now, if I have a funeral, play these hymns at the church,'' and
    another one saying, ``If I have a funeral, put me in this dress.''
        Now, it's going to be hard for me or any other President or any
    Member of Congress to organize this country with the private sector to
    compete and win in the global economy if we have the kind of public
    pathology we have today, where children are shooting children with
    weapons more advanced than the police have.
        I come from across the river in Arkansas where we're about to start
    or maybe they have already started deer season. And some towns, we shut
    the schools and the factories down at the opening of deer season because
    nobody shows up anyway. [Laughter] I understand all about the right to
    keep and bear arms, and I was in the woods when I was barely old enough
    to walk. But I'm telling you, no sane society would allow teenagers to
    have semiautomatic weapons and go on the streets and be better armed
    than the police officers. It is crazy. And nobody else does. Only we do.
    We have to ask ourselves, what are we going to do about this? How did
    this happen? And I think, frankly, if we're going to find the answers,
    we're going to have to all check a lot of our baggage at the door. We've
    got to check our partisan political baggage; we've got to check our
    racial identities; we've got to check everything at the door. We've just
    got to be honest children of God and honest Americans and try to analyze
    how did we get in the fix we're in in this country and what are we going
    to do about it.
        And I have to tell you, I've spent time, I've talked to a lot of
    young people who were and some who are in gangs. I once had someone go
    down to the penitentiary and interview every teenager who was there
    doing a life sentence for murder. Long before I ever thought of running
    for President I went to south central Los Angeles--which later became
    famous when it burned down--a couple of years before I ever thought of
    even getting in this race, just sat in church basements and places like
    that and talked to people about what was going on. And as nearly as I
    can determine, what has happened is a combination of the following:
    Number one, too many of these kids are growing up without family
    supports, without the structure and value and support they need.
        Number two, too many of those kids also have no substitute for the
    family that's positive. The word ``gang'' has a bad connotation now. The
    truth is we all want to be in gangs, if a gang is a group of people that
    think like you do and do like you do. I mean, what's the difference in
    the Baptist Church and the Church of God in Christ? They're two
    different gangs who still want to get to heaven when they die. Right? I
    mean, really, you think about that. What's the difference in the
    Democrats and the Republicans? They're two different gangs, and they
    obey the law, and they vote on election day, and they've got different
    ideas about how to solve problems. This is very important to understand.
    We all want to be part of groups. And we get meaning out of our lives
    from being part of groups, you know?
        When Tennessee beat Arkansas so bad this

    [[Page 1989]]

    year in football, and the Vice President rubbed it in because we beat
    them last year, we were members of two different gangs. It was
    competition and friendly and wholesome and good. This is very important
    to understand. So if you take the family supports away from these kids,
    and then there is nothing where they live that puts them in a good gang,
    that's why they get in gangs that are bad. It's very important to
    understand that.
        The third thing that has happened that is different from what
    happened 30 years ago when people were poor is that you not only have a
    worse family situation and no other community supports--I mean, 30 years
    ago, even when kids didn't grow up in intact families in poor
    neighborhoods, they still lived in places where on every block there was
    a role model. The person who owned the drugstore lived in the
    neighborhood. The person that owned the grocery store lived in the
    neighborhood. The people that filled the churches on Sunday lived in the
    neighborhoods where they went to church. Now, the third thing that's
    happened is, weekend drunks have been substituted by permanent drug
    addicts and drug salesmen. Abuse of alcohol has been replaced by a drug
    culture that makes some people money destroying other people's lives.
    It's different. And it is not simple or easy, what to do about it. Mr.
    Brown's going to talk more about that in a minute.
        The fourth thing that has happened is that the central organizing
    principle of any advanced society has been evaporated, and that is work.
    Forget about work in and of itself, to earn money and contribute to the
    rest of our wealth. If you don't have work in neighborhoods and in
    communities, it is hard for people to organize their lives. It is hard
    for parents to feel self-esteem. It is hard for them to feel confident
    giving their kids rules to live by. It is hard for the relationship
    between the parent and the child to work just right. It is hard for the
    child to look out and imagine that by working hard things will work out
    all right.
        Now, there are lots of other problems. But I'm convinced that those
    are the four biggest ones: the breakdown of the family, the breakdown of
    other community supports, the rise of drugs--it's not just in terms of
    drug abuse but in terms of a way to get rich--and the absence of work.
        And I believe that in order to deal with this, we're going to have
    to all work together in a whole new national contract. But I believe
    this is an economic issue. I think it's a public health issue. I think
    it's a national security issue. And besides that, I'm just tired of
    trying to explain to myself when I go to bed at night why so many
    American kids aren't going to make it when they ought to.
        So there are things for the Federal Government to do, the President,
    and the Congress. There are things for the States to do, things for the
    local folks to do. There are things the private sector has to do. And
    there are certainly things for the churches to do. But I want to submit
    to you that there are things that every American citizen's going to have
    to do.
        This family breakdown problem has developed over 30 years. It didn't
    just happen overnight. The community erosion developed over a long
    period of time. We cannot rebuild all these institutions overnight, but
    we can start saving these kids, in the words of a good friend of mine,
    the same way we lost them, one at a time, which means that there's
    something for all of us to do here. There is something for all of us to
    do. And we need both love and discipline. We need both investment in
    these kids and our future, and we need rules by which people live. We
    need both. It's not an either/or thing.
        That's why I say that I think if we really work at it, we can get
    beyond the Republican, Democrat; who's a liberal, who's a conservative;
    who's black, Hispanic, or white. This is a huge human problem for
    America. And we have to face it. I believe that my daughter's future is
    limited every time another child gets shot in any community in this
    country. That's what I believe. Every time a kid in Memphis is deprived
    of a future, I think it limits all the rest of us. That's what I
    believe. If we believe that, I think we can get there. And let me just
    suggest where I think we have to start nationally.
        The first thing we have to do is to try to make people more secure.
    Until people are physically secure, it is difficult to get them to
    change and to do other things. We have a crime bill now moving through
    the Congress, which would, among other things, put another 100,000
    police officers on the street. It's important not only to put them on
    the street but to have them trained and to have them properly deployed.
    As Lee Brown will tell you, if you do it right, you can reduce the crime
    rate and you can prevent crime and repair lives even as you

    [[Page 1990]]

    are catching criminals more quickly. We should start there.
        I think we ought to pass the crime bill because it offers boot camps
    instead of penitentiaries for first-time offenders. I think we need to
    do something to increase the safety of our schools; 160,000 children
    stay home every day because they're afraid of school. One in five
    children goes to school every day armed with a knife, a gun, or a club,
    every day. We've got to change that.
        I think we have to provide as much as we can an environment in which
    the police have a chance to do their job and in which kids are not
    encouraged to kill each other. There are three bills now being
    considered in the Congress as a part of this crime bill that I favor.
    One says that if you're not old enough to go to war or vote, you ought
    not to be old enough to have a handgun legally, and protects the right
    to hunt and practice by saying that young people under the supervision
    of their parents or other appropriate adults can do that. The other bill
    is the Brady bill, which says that we ought to have a waiting period and
    check out people's criminal history and mental health history before we
    just sell them a gun. And the third bill basically says that people
    ought not to buy in ordinary commerce automatic and semiautomatic
    weapons, the only purpose of which is to kill other people. Now, no
    other country would permit that to happen. I think those things should
    pass. This crime bill is working its way through the Senate, has passed
    the House, could be given to the American people for Christmas; and I
    think we ought to do it. That's where we need to start.
        Then we need to recognize, as we did in our health care bill, that
    you have got to have drug education and drug treatment on demand without
    delay. And we ought not be putting people out of the penitentiary unless
    they get drug treatment when they need it. And we ought not to let this
    country go forward. There are many American families that are not poor,
    that are not in the inner cities that have been touched by the problems
    of drug abuse. But I can tell you, and there is no simple, easy answer
    to this, and nothing works for everybody, but good drug treatment does
    work more than half the time. And we don't provide it. And we're all
    paying for it. So we need to work on that. And we have an obligation
    there at the national level.
        We also have got to find a way to work with the private sector, even
    though we are in serious trouble in terms of having enough money to do
    anything in this country, we have got to find useful work for people who
    live in dangerous, distressed, dysfunctional areas. We have got to give
    structure, order, and discipline to lives again through work. We have
    got to do it.
        The last thing I would say to you is that we can do these things at
    the national level. But we have to give these kids hope again. We have
    to give their families hope again. We have to give their parents who are
    trying hope again. I stopped in that housing project, like Harold said.
    It may be one of the poorest places in this town, but I know that most
    people who live in that housing project do not break the law, do not
    abuse drugs, and are doing the best they can. And a lot of people forget
    that. A lot of people forget that. So that's something you're going to
    have to do. That's your job.
        I live in Washington; you live in Memphis. You've got to do that
    here. You've got to do that. You've got to do it through the churches,
    through the businesses, through the community groups. You've got to help
    slowly but surely get this society back to a point where families can be
    reconstituted, where there can be supports for kids that don't have
    families so they're in a good gang, not a bad gang. We can do this,
    folks.
        And you know, people have been talking about this for years, but
    this is the first time in my memory that I think the American people are
    about fed up, up to their ears in it, scared to death about what's
    happening to our children and their future, and understand that it
    affects all the rest of us. We can do this. We can do this.
        I'll make this pledge to you: If you'll work on it here, I'll work
    on it there. I can no longer justify knowing that there's something I
    can do to make people safer on the streets and our not doing it. I can
    no longer justify knowing there are things we can do that work to reduce
    the drug problem and not doing it. I can no longer justify going to bed
    at night thinking about these children killing other children, thinking
    about these little kids planning their funerals and not doing something
    about it. We can do this. And keep in mind, you're working with the same
    material that's inside you. These are people we're talking about. We can
    turn

    [[Page 1991]]

    this country around if we'll check our divisions at the door, rely on
    what unites us, and go to work.
        Thank you very much, and God bless you.
        Now, before I go, I want to introduce the man who is affectionately
    called the drug czar. It makes him sound like he sells drugs instead of
    stops them, doesn't it? [Laughter] Dr. Lee Brown grew up in California.
    As I said, he was the police chief in Atlanta, Houston, and New York. He
    instituted a program of community policing in New York City, where the
    police went back on the beat, started walking in the neighborhoods. And
    despite all the preconceptions, according to the FBI statistics in the
    last 2 years the crime rate in New York City went down in all seven
    major FBI categories, because they started giving the police force back
    to the neighborhoods and the people and working with friends and
    neighbors to try to stop bad things from happening and catch people who
    do them when they do. That is a remarkable thing.
        I asked him to come onto my administration, and I pledged to him
    that I would make the Drug Policy Director a member of the President's
    Cabinet and that we would get every last department of the Federal
    Government working on the drug problem because I thought he had a
    comprehensive view. I thought he understood how you can't just divide
    drugs from all these other issues, that we had to deal with all this
    together, we had to start at the grassroots level, and that we could
    really get something done if we had creative, good people working hard.
    He's a remarkable man. I am deeply honored that he's in our Cabinet. I
    hope you will welcome him here today and stay here and participate.
    Remember, you've got to do your part, too. He's here to help you.
        Thank you very much. Dr. Lee Brown.

    Note: The President spoke at 1:20 p.m. at the Olivet Baptist Church. In
    his remarks, he referred to Kenneth Twigg Whalum, pastor of the church.