    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [September 24, 1993]
    [Pages 1588-1592]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Community in St. Petersburg, Florida
    September 24, 1993

        Thank you very much. We are delighted to be here today, all of us.
    I'm especially glad that Attorney General Reno came down from Washington
    with me. When she became the Attorney General, Florida gave the United
    States a great national resource, and I know you're all proud of the job
    that she has done.
        I also want to thank my longtime friend Governor Chiles. You know,
    in his former life Governor Chiles was a Member of the United States
    Senate and was head of the budget committee. He thought arithmetic was
    functioning better at the State and local level, and so he decided to
    leave Washington. But when he left, it made it harder for the rest of us
    to make arithmetic work in Washington. And I'm glad to be here with him,
    and I especially honor the innovations that he has pushed in health care
    and in crime.
        I want to thank Congressman Bill Young for hosting me in his
    district and for coming down last night on the plane. I'm also glad to
    see Congressman Miller here today and Congresswoman Karen Thurman from
    your neighboring districts.
        We had a remarkable health care forum last night, as you probably
    know, in Tampa, with about 1,000 people there. And there were six or
    seven Members of Congress, roughly evenly divided between Republicans
    and Democrats, who came there with me in our effort to bring this
    country together around that issue.
        I got a little briefing on St. Petersburg Beach from Mayor Horan
    when I was up here. He told me that we had a wide variety of ages here.
    I think--you said your grandson was here, and he's one year old today.
    Where--is the Mayor's grandson here? Hold up the Mayor's grandson. Look
    at that. And we have at least one of your distinguished citizens here
    who is in her nineties. Melita, stand up there. Thank

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    you. In between, we've got a President; an Attorney General; a Governor;
    three Members of Congress; your State attorney general, Bob Butterworth,
    who is here; the Mayor of St. Petersburg, David Fisher; the chief of
    police of St. Petersburg, Darrel Stephens; a number of State
    representatives and county officials and representatives from community
    groups, Crime Watch and other groups.
        I say that to make this point: If you look out across this crowd
    today, from that young man celebrating his first birthday to this fine
    lady who has seen almost this entire century come and go, you see across
    this crowd people of different races, different political parties,
    different walks of life, all of us part of the family of America, all of
    us caught up now in a time of sweeping and profound change, change which
    opens up to us vistas of opportunity that our forebears could never have
    imagined and change which presents us with threats and troubles that our
    forebears never could have imagined.
        I really believe that in a time like this, my job as your President
    is to try to identify the challenges facing our country and then to try
    to offer my best ideas about a solution and then to try to energize
    people all across the country to work until we find a solution. Whether
    it's the one I suggested or some other one, we have to urgently face
    both the opportunities and the problems before us in a time when we have
    to change so much.
        And that's the first decision we all have to make. Whether it's in
    education or the economy, we have to be willing to change. When you're
    confronted with a time of sweeping changes, with a bunch of things that
    are happening that are good that you can be part of and a bunch of
    things that are happening that are bad that you want to avoid, basically
    you have two options. You can sort of hunker down and put your arms
    around yourself and hope it will go away; that works about one time in a
    hundred. And then if you play the odds, 99 percent of the time what you
    have to do is take a deep breath and stick your chest out and turn right
    into the change and figure out what you can do.
        Now, one of the things that all of us have learned in our lives,
    that even children learn early, is that you are more able to make
    changes you need to make when you are more secure. The more personally
    secure you are, the more you feel good about who you are and your
    connections to other people and your roots in a community, the more you
    are able to change. It seems almost ironic, but the more rooted you are
    in the traditionally human ties and the traditional human values that
    make life so rich, the more you're able to change so that you can
    enhance what you value. The more insecure we are, the more difficult it
    is for us to change because we're too busy just trying to survive.
        So, in a funny way, the pursuit that we must have as a people for
    security is tied closely to the pursuant we must have as a people for
    change. And I believe as strongly as I can say that that's one of the
    reasons that makes this campaign for health care reform so important,
    that it will give our people the security to change. And it's one of the
    things that makes our efforts to try to reduce the crime rate and
    enhance human decency and dignity and reduce violence and destruction in
    our country so important because that is the security we need, the
    bedrock we need to make the economic changes, to make the education and
    training changes, to make the other changes we need in this country.
        Last night, when we had that wonderful town hall meeting, people
    asked dozens and dozens of questions--I don't know how long we stayed
    there; it was way too late. [Laughter] There are a lot of people in
    America, if they watched that whole show last night, are sleepy at work
    today, I'll tell you that. But what you saw there is people yearning for
    security.
        Here in this area, the principles I announced in health care reform
    are very much related to the principles of this anticrime effort our
    administration is undertaking. Security, health care that you've always
    got, that can't be taken away. Simplify the system; it's a nightmare for
    the doctors and the nurses and the people who are getting health care.
    Achieve savings, because the system is too wasteful, you can't justify
    putting more money in a broken machine until you've fixed it. Maintain
    choice for consumers and have quality. One of the things that matters so
    much in Florida is the idea that people on Medicare as well as people on
    Medicaid will be able to get prescription drugs now under this program,
    very important for older people to maintain their quality of life. And
    finally, to have more responsibility in the system. And that relates
    directly to the crime issue because one of the reasons American health
    care is so expensive is that our hospitals and our emergency

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    rooms are full of people who are cut up and shot. If you look at the
    amount of money the American taxpayers pay in health care for violence,
    it is staggering. And the more we do that, the less we have to spend on
    other things that make us all well and more secure.
        Now, one of the things that our health care reform package and the
    crime initiatives that the Attorney General is leading have in common is
    a focus on prevention. You know, I got a great hand the other night
    talking to Congress, and I said, ``You know how your mother said an
    ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? Well, your mother was
    right.'' Well, that's the truth. For the first time, if we pass this
    health care reform program, everybody will have in their health care
    package preventive services. We will save money and enhance the quality
    of life, enhance security if you give every child an immunization plan,
    if you have well-baby visits, if you have Pap smears and mammograms and
    cholesterol tests and the kinds of things that keep people well as well
    as help them to get well if they get sick.
        The same thing is true in crime. We know from experience after
    experience after experience that the kind of violence that has
    unfortunately gripped the headlines in Florida in the last several days
    and grieved so many of us as Americans, when people who come to our
    shores are hurt or killed when they want to see our country and they
    want to get to know the best about it, that is far from a problem of
    Florida alone. And certainly not a problem for our foreign visitors
    alone. When Michael Jordan's father was killed recently, a nation
    grieved, but no one knew the names of the other 22 people who died in
    that county this year. This is a national problem.
        When I was born in 1946, homicide wasn't even in the top ten leading
    causes of death in America. In fact, listen to this, throughout my
    lifetime homicide never made the top ten until 1989. And yet, now,
    homicide is the second leading cause of death among Americans age 15 to
    25. And more of our teenage boys die from gunshots now than any other
    cause.
        Now, we can decide again what to do with this. Are we going to
    hunker down and turn away and pretend it's not happening? Maybe it will
    go away; we've got a one chance in a hundred that will happen. Or we can
    face it, and we can face the problem in all of its human manifestations,
    just the way the Attorney General said.
        These kids we just met out here who got in trouble and now they're
    in this program, pretty good kids. They've got a whole life ahead of
    them. They've got contributions they can make. And we need to see what
    we can do about preventing the life that might happen that none of us
    want to occur.
        This initiative that we have undertaken in our administration to
    give more security and to make this society safer includes at least
    three forms of prevention I want to emphasize, because we know they work
    and because they are rooted in getting people at the grassroots
    community level more power over their own lives.
        First is giving these children who get in trouble something to say
    yes to and some order and framework in their lives. Senator Moynihan
    said on television last Sunday, the distinguished Senator from New York
    who's been a student of American social history for 50 years, ``We have
    gotten used to accepting a lot of behavior from people in this country
    that's pretty destructive. We have gotten used to the fact that a lot of
    kids grow up alone or almost alone in conditions that are very damaging
    to themselves and aren't conducive to learning good things and good
    habits.'' And we have let it happen. But all over America there are
    programs like the boot camp program. One of these young men just came
    out of the boot camp program of this program and he told the Governor
    that he liked the program. More people ought to be in it, because, he
    said, ``It used to be you could''-- he knew this--he said, ``It used to
    be you could ship kids my age off to the service, but we're going down.
    We don't have a draft anymore. We're going down in the number of people
    in the service. So we've got to have a substitute where people can learn
    discipline and order and be able to see the future as something that
    happens 3 years from now, not 3 minutes from now.'' And we have to have
    programs like this Marine Institute, which now is spreading across the
    country. This program is giving young people a chance to take their
    future back, a chance to understand that there is good inside them, that
    they can do things that are useful and productive and profitable and a
    lot more fun than whatever it is that got them into this program in the
    first place.
        Those young people told me what it was like to learn how to give
    CPR, to learn how to scuba dive, to learn how to repair a boat and

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    fix it so it would sail, to learn how to deal with each other and with
    adults so that they could get jobs. This program now operates in
    partnership with grassroots people in seven other States nationwide.
    They've taken 20,000 young people at risk and helped them to become
    responsible citizens. And so far, after they leave this program 75
    percent of the young people that go through this program never have any
    criminal convictions again. If every young person in America that got in
    trouble had a chance to be in a program like this, think what a
    difference it would make. It's very important. How many times do you
    pick up the paper and read about somebody finally did something terrible
    after they had been arrested 13 times or 15 times or 20 times. We need a
    system in this country, and the National Government cannot do it, but we
    can help you do it. We can help provide funds and support and technical
    expertise, but people at the grassroots level have to do it. We've got
    to have systems in this country where everybody in those critical young
    years has a chance to be in a boot camp like this, like you have in
    Florida, or a program like the Marine Institute or both if they need it.
        We have an experimental program we started last June. Ten military
    facilities have been enclosed across the country where kids who are high
    school dropouts are able to come back and get their GED and have the
    benefit of military-type training. And a lot of these kids just love it.
    It's just changed their whole outlook on life. We have got to understand
    that we are raising a generation without the structure and order and
    predictability and support and reinforcement that most of us just took
    for granted. We took it for granted. And there's no use in us pretending
    that some National Government program and money alone will fix it. But
    there's no use in us pretending that just preaching at people will fix
    it, either. We have to actually change the conditions of opportunity for
    these young people.
        The second thing we have to do is to recognize that our police
    forces can do more if they're more closely connected to the community,
    if there are enough of them, and if they operate in the same
    neighborhoods and concentrate on the problem areas. The buzzword for
    that is community policing. And it works. It works. I have been in
    cities all across America where the crime rate is dropping because of
    concentrated community policing strategy where police work in
    partnership with the citizens who live in a community, focus their
    resources on the areas of greatest opportunity, respond quickly to
    problems. I have seen that. That works.
        The chief of police of St. Petersburg, Darrel Stephens, who's here,
    has been one of our Nation's leading promoters of community policing.
    And it does move away from the old ways of trying to catch criminals
    after a crime occurs to doing as much as you can to prevent crime in the
    first place. That drives down the crime rate.
        This year under Attorney General Reno's leadership, our Department
    of Justice will fund five community policing projects in our Nation to
    serve as models for the rest of the country. In a competitive process,
    the Justice Department tried to find rural examples and urban examples,
    small and medium sized towns as well as big ones. Due to the strength of
    the programs in your communities, the Justice Department has selected
    two of the five prototypes to be here in Florida, one in St. Petersburg,
    and the other in Hillsboro County, right next door. And these funds--not
    massive amounts of money, $200,000 apiece--will enable these communities
    to strengthen their own community policing programs and develop them in
    a way that can be copied by other communities.
        One of the things that the Attorney General and I were talking about
    on the way up here is it never ceases to amaze me that nearly every
    problem in America has been addressed well by somebody somewhere, but we
    don't learn very well from one another yet. And one of the things that
    this Government is dedicated to doing in my administration is taking
    what works at the grassroots level and giving other people a chance to
    do it. And I thank you for that.
        Now, the third thing I want to emphasize and the third thing I think
    we have to recognize is if you want to prevent crime in this country,
    violent crime, if you want to stop gunshot wounds from being the leading
    cause of death among young teenage boys, if you want to change the
    circumstance in which the average age of people killing each other is
    now under 16 in some of our cities, you have to change the fact that
    America is the only country in the civilized world where a teenager can
    walk the street at random and be better armed than most police forces.
    We have to face that fact.

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    The crime bill, which was introduced just a couple of days ago in both
    the Senate and the House, contains more funds for more police officers
    on the street, something I believe in, we want to put another 100,000
    out there in America so everybody can adopt a community policing
    strategy. It also has the Brady bill which will require a 5-day waiting
    period before anybody can purchase a handgun. And in addition to that,
    there are several bills in the Congress, and I hope and pray one of them
    can reach my desk this year, which will ban various types of assault
    weapons entirely from being held in the possession of our young people.
        Let me tell you something, folks. I come from a State where more
    than half the adults have a hunting or a fishing license or both, where
    most of us were in the woods by the time we were 6 years old, where some
    schools and some plants have to be closed on the opening day of deer
    season. Nobody shows up anyway. [Laughter] There's not a person in this
    country that values the culture of the outdoors and the hunting and all
    of that any more than I do. But neither those who love to hunt, or who
    love to shoot weapons in contests, nor the framers of the Constitution
    when they wrote the second amendment ever envisioned a time when
    children on our streets would illegally be in possession of weapons
    designed solely to kill other people and have more weapons than the
    people who were supposed to be policing them. And we better stop it if
    we want to recover our country.
        Just last week the Governor of Colorado, Governor Roy Romer, signed
    a law that prohibits juveniles from owning handguns. He joined Governor
    Florio of New Jersey and 17 others who have passed that law this year.
        These are things we have to do. All three of these things are
    preventive. They're worth a pound of cure. Have more programs like this
    one. Give these kids a chance to have something to say yes to, not just
    telling them what they have to say no to, and a chance to order their
    lives and to fill themselves from the inside out. A lot of these
    programs don't deal with people from the inside out. That's the only way
    you can really change people's lives.
        Give our police forces a chance to succeed with a community-based
    strategy that prevents crimes as well as catches criminals. And get the
    guns out of the hands of the kids. Give our law enforcement officers a
    fighting chance to keep the streets safe and people secure.
        These are elements of prevention that will give us the security we
    need to make the changes we need economically to move into the 21st
    century. They will have the extra benefit of dramatically lowering the
    costs of health care and enabling us to finance the kind of progress we
    need in health care which again will give us the security we need to be
    the people we have to be in this dynamic era.
        Thank you very much, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:14 a.m. at the Pinellas Marine
    Institute.