[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[February 15, 1994]
[Pages 257-263]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Law Enforcement Community in London, Ohio
February 15, 1994

    Thank you very much. Thank you, Ray Skillern, for that introduction 
and, even more important, for your personal endorsement of community 
policing. I'm glad to be here with John Lenhart and Greg Merritt and my 
longtime friend Attorney General Lee Fisher. I thank him for what he 
said and for the work he is doing with all of you here in Ohio with 
Operation Crackdown and with many other anticrime initiatives.
    I thank Senator Glenn and Senator Biden for coming down here. 
Senator Biden doesn't represent Ohio, except he represents all the law 
enforcement people in Ohio as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, 
and I appreciate him taking a whole day off from this break and

[[Page 258]]

coming down and being with Senator Glenn and me and being here with your 
Congresswoman Deborah Pryce. The three of them will have to vote to 
produce a crime bill that will deal with the issues I came here to 
discuss with you today.
    I also want to say a special word of appreciation to all the State 
officials who have come out either here or at the airport and to Ron 
Noble, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who came down with me. He 
has a lot to do with not only the Secret Service, who are my law 
enforcement detail--that's a job in itself from time to time--but also 
with the work we're doing to try to stiffen the regulations on gun 
dealers. I want to say a little more about that in a moment.
    And finally, let me thank the leaders of the police associations who 
are here: the FOP president, Dewey Stokes, from Ohio; the head of the 
National Association of Police Officers, Bob Scully, who came down with 
us; and your State FOP president, Steve Young. I thank all of them.
    I came here today because your work, all of you who are in law 
enforcement, is probably more important to most Americans today than it 
has ever been in the whole history of the country. We know what crime 
and violence is doing to our people. The good news is that they know 
what it's doing to them, and they really want us to do something about 
it. And maybe for the first time, the American people are willing to do 
their part, too.
    This is a moment of great hope and opportunity for America. 
Everywhere I go it's what people want to talk to me about. The other day 
I flew into Shreveport, Louisiana, and the front page of the newspaper 
had a letter that a teenage girl had written to me. So she came out to 
meet me at the airport, this young girl. And her letter said this: ``If 
I could meet the President, I would ask him to make his top priority 
crime. Crime is so bad I'm afraid to go outside. I really didn't pay 
attention to crime until someone shot and killed my friend who was one 
of my church members. My concern is,''--listen to this--``My concern is 
I won't have anyone to marry because all the nice young men will have 
been killed, incarcerated, or in a gang. If I could give only one gift 
to America and the world, it would be no guns, no killing, just peace.''
    Over the weekend, four people were shot, and a little girl was 
killed in an apartment complex in Bucyrus, not too far from here. This 
morning I met the widow and the father of Officer Chris Clites of the 
Columbus Police Department who was killed in the line of duty. I met a 
14-year-old girl named Sarah Johnson from Cleveland who saw a friend of 
hers being beaten by three juveniles and two adults, and she ran into 
the crowd and threw herself on the body of her friend, unfortunately, 
too late to save his life. Too bad no adults would follow her example, 
maybe the child would be living today. I met a woman named Anne Ross 
from Dayton, whose life has been threatened repeatedly because she began 
a program called Ravenwood 2000 that works with police to close crack 
houses in her neighborhood, something the Attorney General has worked so 
hard on. I met a man named Jim Johnson, who's from the Driving Park area 
of east Columbus, who's devoting much of his life now to crime patrols 
and helping citizens work with police officers to reduce the crime rate.
    In the last three decades, violent crimes have increased by 300 
percent. Over the last 3 years, almost a third of Americans have either 
had themselves or someone in their families victimized by crime. 
Yesterday was the 65th anniversary of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre 
in Chicago, which captured the entire Nation's attention. The country 
was riveted by the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre. Some of you may be 
old enough to remember it as children; I have seen movies about it. It 
absolutely galvanized the Nation. In 1929, seven people were killed; 
that was a massacre in 1929. In most cities today, it's a normal 
weekend.
    What are we going to do about this? Here is what our administration 
is trying to do. First, we want a drug strategy that gets hard-core drug 
users, who cause most of the drug-related crimes, off the streets, out 
of crime, and into treatment. Second, we want a tough, smart crime bill 
that puts 100,000 more police officers on the street and violent 
criminals behind bars. Third, we want to use every resource at our 
disposal to fight crime and drugs from public schools to public housing. 
Fourth, we want to give our young people something to say ``yes'' to by 
putting hope and opportunity back in their lives. And finally, we want 
to challenge every American to work with you, the law enforcement 
community, as partners, to put the values of

[[Page 259]]

work and family and community back at the center of the lives of our 
young people before it is too late for them.
    I care a lot about this problem. The first elected job I ever had 
was as attorney general of my home State. I was a Governor for a dozen 
years. I know what it means to double the prison capacity of a State and 
to sign laws toughening crimes and to carry out the death penalty, to 
add to the stock of police officers and try to deal with all the 
problems that are facing them. I know this is a tough problem. I also 
know it is a complicated one. It's easy to demagogue, easy to talk 
about, and quite another thing to do something that will make a 
fundamental difference in the lives of the people of this country.
    You have to help us to do something that is tough but that is also 
smart, something that will actually make a difference to every one of 
you when you get up in the morning and you put on your uniform and you 
put on your weapon and you go out and put your life on the line. You 
need to work with us to make sure that what we do makes a difference to 
you and to what you're doing, that it's not just another bunch of 
political speeches that sound good and score 90 percent in the polls, 
but may not make a difference. You need to make sure we make a 
difference.
    The purpose of all public service, your work and mine, should be to 
get people together and to get something done. That is what we are 
trying to do here.
    First of all, it's clear that to reduce crime significantly in 
America we have to reduce hardcore drug use. Last week our Drug Policy 
Director Lee Brown, who was the chief of police in Houston, Atlanta, and 
New York, and one of the pioneers of the community policing concept that 
Patrolman Skillern talked so eloquently about, announced, along with me, 
our strategy on drug control and drug abuse. It focuses on hardcore drug 
use because that's the worst part of the problem. Heavy users can--just 
for example, heavy users are about 20 percent of all cocaine users, but 
they consume two-thirds of the available cocaine. And more than 50 
percent of the people arrested for crimes now test positive for drugs. 
We have got to get these hardcore users off the street. For those who 
are going to be back on the street, we have got to get them into 
treatment. We want to help them get the treatment they need, but if they 
don't get the message we have to use the courts, the jails, the prisons 
to make sure they do. Our budget and the crime bill, if they both pass, 
will help us to get another 140,000 hardcore drug users into substantial 
treatment programs that have a chance to work per year.
    There are two other things that we have emphasized. First of all, 
there is a disturbing bit of evidence in this last year that casual drug 
use among young people is beginning to rise again. And we have to get 
the message out to them. The only policy to follow is no use. Drugs are 
dangerous. Drugs are illegal. It cannot become acceptable among young 
people to use drugs again. We have got to send the message out loud and 
clear. We know the most powerful tool we have over the long run is 
changing the whole culture in America. I don't know how many of you have 
been active in the DARE program, but when my daughter was in the 5th 
grade I heard her and her classmates give me no less than 10 speeches 
about the officer that came on a regular basis in the DARE program. It 
makes a difference whether kids are told early and clearly, by someone 
they really respect, that the only sensible policy is no use.
    And finally, we're going to try to alter our policy relating to 
controlling the supply of drugs coming into this country. We spend a lot 
of time trying to patrol our borders. We spend a lot of time trying to 
patrol the high seas. We want to spend more money, more resources, and 
more efforts going after the drug dealers and the drug kingpins in their 
home countries. They come after us at home; we should go after them at 
home. The drug strategy must work with the crime bill. And the most 
important message I have to say to you again today is we need your help 
to pass a crime bill that makes a difference.
    Last summer I stood with police officers and leaders of police 
associations, along with Senator Biden as the chair of the Judiciary 
Committee and the longtime strongest, most consistent proponent of 
getting a new crime bill, to propose a comprehensive plan to put more 
police on the streets, more criminals behind bars, and to do more than 
we'd ever done before to prevent crime. Just before Thanksgiving, as Lee 
Fisher said, the Congress passed the Brady bill, which requires a 5-day 
waiting period before purchasing a handgun so we can check into criminal 
records.

[[Page 260]]

    Meanwhile, in the Senate, Senator Biden introduced our anticrime 
bill, working with the Attorney General and with Members in both parties 
of the Senate. It went through the Senate, and it provides, among other 
things, for another 100,000 police officers on the street, for a ban on 
assault weapons, for an enormous increase in the investment that the 
Federal Government makes to the States for alternatives to imprisonment, 
like boot camps for young people, and more help for States. It's a big 
deal in Ohio, to deal with prison overcrowding and for some other things 
that I'll talk more about in a minute. It's a very good bill.
    In the House, there were important parts of the program which were 
adopted, but the House has not yet succeeded in passing all the elements 
of the crime bill so that the Senate and House can then get together, 
agree on a common bill, pass it, and send it to me for signature.
    The American people have waited on this bill long enough. It was 
almost passed, or a previous version of it, in 1992, and it didn't pass. 
This bill needs to be passed, on my desk for signature soon. This is not 
something we should take all year doing. We should take a few weeks, do 
it right, and send it to the President's desk.
    I'll make this commitment: If Congress will pass the bill soon, I 
will respond by cutting through the redtape and the bureaucracy in 
Washington so that within a year 20,000 new police officers are hired 
and start the training that they need to make our streets safer. We need 
some clear things in the crime bill that come out of both the Senate and 
the House.
    What's the bottom line? One, we've got to have a stronger police 
presence not only to catch criminals but to prevent crime. The Senate's 
approved and the House should approve another 100,000 police officers 
over the next 5 years. It will be paid for not by new taxes but through 
a violent crime trust fund that will pay for the entire crime bill 
through reductions in the Federal bureaucracy--reductions by attrition. 
We have proposed to reduce the number of Federal employees over the next 
5 years by 252,000. That's a 12-percent reduction. It would make the 
Federal Government the smallest it's been in 30 years and take the 
entire amount of money we get from the savings and put it into fighting 
crime. I think it's a good swap.
    But if we do it, then it's important that the local departments do 
what Ray Skillern talked about. We've got to have more police officers 
on the street, people who know their neighbors and know the children and 
understand when there are problems and listen to people when there's a 
stranger in the neighborhood and do things that are necessary to keep 
crime from happening in the first place as well as to catch criminals 
quicker. We know that works. We know that works.
    The mayor of Houston was recently reelected with 91 percent of the 
vote. You can't get 91 percent of the people to agree that the sun's 
coming up tomorrow morning. [Laughter] Why? Because he put another 655 
police officers on the street, and in one year--15 months--crime dropped 
22 percent and the murder rate dropped 27 percent. Why? Because the 
police officers did two things: They got back in touch with the 
community, and they were heavily deployed toward the areas where they 
knew the biggest problems would be. We can do this. We can do this. 
We'll provide the people; you have to deploy them properly. But we can 
do it.
    Now once again, this is an issue where the people may be ahead of 
Washington. We've got a smaller program that the Attorney General runs 
that the Congress has provided for us to put more police officers on the 
street. It's a grant program, and communities of all sizes all across 
America apply for it. We have given out 100 grants to cities and 
communities nationwide, including four in Ohio, to Cleveland, Mansfield, 
Newark, and Xenia. Now that's the good news. The bad news is, we have 
received applications from 3,000 communities. And instead of making 
people happy, every time--because there's so much focus on this at the 
grassroots--every time we announce these grants I get 10 calls from 
mayors saying, ``I helped you in 1992. I've got a problem. Where's my 
money?'' The answer is, your money is in the crime bill. Help us pass 
it, so we can help all of America and not just a few.
    Second, the crime bill stiffens penalties. It does add capital 
punishment for a number of crimes and some of them are quite 
appropriate. When someone kills a law enforcement officer in the line of 
duty, I think the penalty for that ought to be death. There ought to be 
a deterrent that is clear and unambiguous. But even more significant 
perhaps is the concept that is now sweeping America that is known under 
the slogan ``three strikes and you're out.'' And I want to talk about it 
because I support it. A

[[Page 261]]

significant percentage of the violent crimes in this country are done by 
a very small percentage of the total criminal population. Most criminals 
are nonviolent. Most criminals who commit violent offenses are not 
committing life-threatening offenses or rape. We know that. We know that 
there are a core of people who are predisposed to do things which are 
horrible, and that is the genesis of the ``three strikes and you're 
out.'' If people cannot stop doing things that threaten other people's 
lives, they simply shouldn't be eligible for parole.
    Now, the important thing about this is, if we're going to pass it in 
the Congress we ought to do it right. There should be no partisanship in 
this, no politics, no posturing. We ought to do what is right for 
America. We ought to pass a tough, good, clear bill, but we shouldn't 
litter it up with every offense in the world that the average police 
officer will tell you in the front end shouldn't be part of it. In other 
words, we need to draw this properly and right, so we can set a standard 
that says ``three strikes and you're out'' and it means something that 
every American can agree with.
    And then we have to recognize, as all of you know, that most laws, 
criminal laws, are State laws, and most criminal law enforcement is done 
by local police officials. And therefore, we have to hope that what we 
do in the Congress will set a standard that all other States then across 
the country will embrace, so we can identify the relatively small number 
of people that are wreaking heartbreak and devastation and death and put 
them behind bars and keep them there.
    When we do that we also have to help you with more space for dealing 
with some of your prison problems. And we are debating what the best way 
to do that is. I want to say, on the way down here today, Senator Glenn 
gave me a speech--I could tell he'd given it before, but it still was 
good--[laughter]--about the Ohio prison overcrowding problem and how we 
ought to have nonviolent offenders and less expensive construction. He 
said, ``You know, when I was a Marine, a quonset hut was good enough for 
me, and it ought to be good enough for criminals as well.'' Because I 
was a Governor and an attorney general I could write you a book on the 
cost of building penitentiaries and what's wrong with it, but I won't do 
that today.
    The fourth thing we need to do is to make sure the criminals are not 
better armed than police officers. We ought to pass the assault weapons 
ban. The Senate bill that your other Senator, who is not here today, 
Senator Metzenbaum, has worked so hard on bans the manufacture, 
transfer, and possession of deadly military-style assault weapons and 
large-capacity ammunition-feeding devices. These weapons have become the 
weapons of choice for drug traffickers, street gangs, and paramilitary 
extremists groups. Just ask the leaders of the police organizations that 
are here, ask Bob Scully and Dewey Stokes what they know about this as a 
national problem, not just an Ohio problem, as a national problem. The 
leaders of the police organizations in this country have told Congress 
time and time again until they're blue in the face that these weapons 
cannot be allowed on the street, that it is wrong to send police 
officers out to fight people who are better armed than they are. This 
has nothing to do with sportsmanship.
    Now the fifth thing we need to do is to make our schools gun-free, 
drug-free, and violence-free. If kids can't go to school safe, this 
country cannot move into the 21st century in good shape. It sounds like 
a simple thing, but there have been schools in this country where people 
do bullet drills. I met at one of my town meetings in California--this 
really eloquent young man stood up and said, ``My brother and I, we 
don't want to be in a gang. We don't want to have guns. We don't want to 
do wrong. We want to stay in school and make something of ourselves. And 
we left the school in our neighborhood because it wasn't safe. We went 
to another school because we thought it was safer, and a nut walked in 
that school when we were registering, shooting a gun, and shot my 
brother standing right in front of me to register for school.'' There 
are hundreds of stories like this, all over America. We have got to make 
the schools safe. Our bill allocates $300 million over 3 years for local 
schools and communities for safe-school projects. Up to a third of it 
can be used for metal detectors, school police, or security measures, 
the rest to provide alcohol and drug education counseling for youngsters 
who are victims of violence and activities to get young people to stay 
out of gangs.
    You know, we've got to put basic recreation and a spirit of teamwork 
and working together back into a lot of these schools. There are a lot 
of schools in America today where there is nothing for these kids to do 
anymore, where all the tough financial problems have found their

[[Page 262]]

way into just taking out things that would give the kids something they 
can do.
    I've said this many times, but if you think about it, all of us are 
part of gangs, we just need to be in good gangs. We all have a need to 
be a part of something. The local police force is a gang. If you're on a 
bowling team, it's a gang. Right? Your church is a group of people that 
think like you do. I mean, people are social animals; they have to be 
part of something. And we have to do that.
    The final thing I want to say is there is lots of evidence that 
young people can be taught to find ways that are nonviolent to resolve 
their conflicts and their frustrations. They can do that. We have run 
across at least one school in the last year that had a wonderfully 
successful program for reducing violence, and it had to be suspended 
after a year because someone had given them $3,000 to bring in someone 
to run the program and they didn't continue the gift. We ought to be 
able to build that in. If we know you've got kids coming out of 
difficult circumstances, every school that needs to do it should have 
someone who is trained who can teach kids how to find nonviolent ways to 
deal with their frustrations and resolve their conflicts.
    Another thing that's in this crime bill that's been a cause for 
Senator Biden I wanted to mention is that it makes a special effort to 
prevent crimes of violence against women, who are especially vulnerable 
to violent crime. This crime bill increases sentences for rape, requires 
rapists to pay damages to victims, protects women against domestic 
violence, and creates training programs to help judges learn more about 
this because a lot of judges don't know how to handle these things as 
well as possible. You haven't read much about this, but this provision 
dealing with crimes against women I think is one of the more important 
things in the crime bill over the long run. We have got to be more 
sensitive to this.
    Again let me say, finally, we have to do more to prevent crime. 
There have got to be more things done that provide alternatives for 
kids. This crime bill has summer youth activities, recreation programs 
in high-crime areas, and after-school programs. We need to do more on 
that.
    This year the National Service Program that I worked so hard to 
start has 3,000 young people going out all across America in their 
communities to work on trying to give young people something to do that 
will prevent crime, a summer of safety in service to America. I'm very 
proud of it; we need more of that all across the country.
    Now let me say, I know the crime bill won't solve all the problems, 
but it will make a beginning. Our HUD Secretary, Henry Cisneros, has a 
safe homes initiative in public housing projects. The Treasury Secretary 
is tightening up on Federal licensing of firearms dealers. There are 
more gun dealers in America than there are people running filling 
stations, or something I know more about, people who own McDonald's. 
[Laughter] You laugh about it, but that's stunning, isn't it? It's 
stunning. And we have to do something about it.
    We are doing what we can to try to deal with it. We also recognize 
that crime is highest in areas where families are weakest, communities 
are weakest, and where there are the fewest jobs. We know that. We know 
that a lot of these problems move in, almost pulled in by the vacuum 
created by the breakdown of family, community, and work. And we have 
some strategies designed to encourage the business community in this 
country to invest in putting people back to work in these areas where 
chronic unemployment is so high.
    America, out of its generosity, has spent a lot of your money in the 
last 10 to 15 years trying to get American businesses to invest in the 
Caribbean, to invest in the developing world, to give people a chance to 
grow in the idea that it was good for our long-term self-interest, that 
if these people had jobs and incomes, they would buy more American 
products. In America's cities today and in our devastated rural areas, 
there are people who would love to buy American products if they had the 
jobs. We ought to have the same policy for them we do for countries 
abroad.
    The last thing I'd like to say is we need help. We need you to help 
us pass the crime bill. But we also need the American people to 
recognize that you cannot do this alone. The most law-abiding societies 
are not necessarily those with the biggest police forces, they are those 
that have the strongest families, the strongest values, the strongest 
code of conduct against hurting their neighbors. We need help. And every 
American that is willing to support this crime bill and stand up and 
shout, hallelujah, when more police officers are hired on the

[[Page 263]]

street needs to be not only law-abiding but law-supporting.
    Every American can be part of a crime control unit. Every American 
can be part of doing something in the neighborhood school to help those 
kids who don't have parents to teach them right from wrong. Most of them 
are still real good kids, and they're doing the best they can early on 
and they need help. Every American can do something to restore these 
values.
    And let me say, when I see what has happened in the crime area: 3 
times as many murders today as in 1960; 3 times as many violent crimes 
per police officer as there were 30 years ago; and 3 times as many 
births outside marriage, where there has never been a marriage, also 
related to the ultimate crime problem, I realize that a lot of these 
things are going to require the American people to get together and get 
something done.
    They can't just look at you. They can't just look at me. They can't 
just look at your Members of Congress. We have to look inside, too. Yes, 
there's a role for the Congress; yes, there's a role for the police. But 
there's a role for the American people, too. You can't make me believe 
that we can't take our streets back and give our kids their futures 
back. And we're going to do our best, starting with the crime bill. We 
want you to help us.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 12:25 p.m. at the Ohio Peace Officers 
Training Academy. In his remarks, he referred to Raymond Skillern, 
police patrolman, Canton, OH; John Lenhart, superintendent, Ohio Bureau 
of Criminal Identification and Investigation; and Greg Merritt, 
executive director, Ohio Police Officers Training Academy.