[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

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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.