[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[March 10, 1994]
[Pages 419-428]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the AmeriCorps Public Safety Forum in New York City
March 10, 1994

    The President. Thank you very much, President Lattin, and my good 
friend Congressman Chuck Schumer. And in a moment you'll hear from Eli 
Segal, who is the head of our national service effort, so I won't 
introduce him more now. I want to thank all of the members of all the 
service groups who are here from not only from New York but many from 
other States, and recognize the chair of the board of the corporation of 
national service, Mr. Jim Josephs, who came. Thank you for being here, 
sir. I also want to thank three distinguished New Yorkers for their 
presence in the audience: your new attorney general, Oliver Koppell; New 
York City's public advocate and my longtime friend, Mr. Mark Green; and 
the man who first introduced me to the local government of the city of 
Brooklyn, the Brooklyn borough president, Howard Golden. Thank you.
    Before Chuck Schumer sits down, I want to ask him to come back up 
here to show you: This man has a broken arm, as you can see, and he's 
slightly incapacitated. So I asked him if I could join his two children 
and sign his cast. I do this to make a point I try to make at every 
speech, which is that government cannot solve all the problems of 
America. That's why we need all of you in service. And government cannot 
solve all these problems, either, because he is not the victim of a 
crime but

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his own awkwardness; he fell. This is a problem I can't solve, so I'm 
just putting my stamp of approval on the treatment of it. [Laughter]
    Representative Charles Schumer. Mr. President, what I wanted to say 
is, you saw our Senator wearing a cast, but he broke his arm the 
Republican way, skiing in Vail. [Laughter] I broke my arm slipping on 
the ice 11 o'clock Saturday night to go to a community event at the Good 
Shepherd School in Sheepshead Bay.
    The President. That wasn't on the program. But it was pretty funny. 
[Laughter]
    Ladies and gentlemen, this is the first of a national series of 
programs on our national service program which we called AmeriCorps. The 
topic we are here to discuss today is how to bring people together and 
communities together to encourage them to assume some responsibility for 
dealing with the violence that has become all too common in most 
American communities.
    It's appropriate that we begin here in New York City, that we begin 
in Brooklyn in the congressional district of Chuck Schumer, because he 
has been the architect and the strategist behind almost every major 
anticrime initiative that the Congress dealt with in recent years.
    It took 7 years and a change of administrations, but we finally got 
the Brady bill to become the Brady law. There were skeptics who said 
this will not make any difference, but you ought to see the results in 
the first couple of weeks of the Brady bill becoming a law. All over 
America, in little communities and big, people who had criminal records 
were actually buying guns formally, legally in gun stores; they were 
found out; illegal guns were collected; criminals were apprehended. This 
law is going to make a difference.
    Chuck Schumer has also worked for community policing and for safe 
schools and for the ban on assault weapons that he talked about so 
strongly. That ban on assault weapons is in the crime bill that has 
already passed the United States Senate. And tomorrow Mr. Schumer goes 
back to Washington to work with his subcommittee to begin to mark up the 
crime bill that also will put another 100,000 police officers on the 
street, ban 28 kinds of assault weapons, and give us the chance to give 
people like you the chance to do some things to prevent crime from 
happening, and give our young people something to say yes to, as well as 
to say no to.
    I'd also like to say a special word of appreciation for the work 
that has been done by New York Senator Daniel Moynihan on this issue. He 
asked me to say to you how sorry he was he couldn't be here today. He 
had originally planned to come with me but had an obligation in 
Washington which prevented him from leaving. But for 28 years he's been 
warning us about the fragile state of families and communities, the 
social institutions that hold us all together.
    About a year ago, he gave a speech at the 50th anniversary of his 
own high school graduation from Benjamin Franklin High School in East 
Harlem. In that speech he talked about how much New York had changed in 
50 years. In 1943, he said, there were exactly 44 homicides by gunshot 
in the entire city of New York, when the population then was only 
150,000 more than it is now, but was more. In 1992, instead of 44, there 
were 1,499. He sent me a chart that tracked the murder rate in New York 
since the turn of the century, and it was only a generation ago that the 
murder rate began to explode.
    About that time, on a New York night 30 years ago this very Sunday, 
a 28-year-old woman known to the neighborhood as Kitty Genovese parked 
her car outside her home, as she always did. She was coming home after a 
long day working as the manager of a nearby bar. She had come to New 
York to work, to make a life for herself in this great city, drawn like 
so many before and since by the power of opportunity and enthusiasm that 
I see in this room. As she walked to her building, a man grabbed her and 
stabbed her. She cried for help. She screamed for help so loudly that it 
woke people up in the middle of the night. Lights came on in the 
apartment building; a window opened; the attacker got nervous and left. 
Now, this was 30 years ago, not 30 days ago. But not a single person 
came to the aid of the woman as she tried to get herself to safety. So 
the man came back and stabbed her again. As 38 witnesses watched or 
listened from the safety of their own homes, Kitty Genovese screamed 
that she was dying. So the attacker fled again, but still no one came to 
the rescue. No one even called the police at a time when the average 
response time was 2 minutes. So the attacker came back a third time, 
stabbed Kitty Genovese again and killed her, over 20 minutes after she 
first cried for help. A call to the police would have brought

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a patrol car in 2 minutes. But as one man told investigators, ``I don't 
want to get involved.''
    Well, that story shocked us all 30 years ago, not just because of 
what happened to that woman, as tragic as it was, but also because of 
what had happened to her neighbors. It sent a chilling message about 
what had happened at that time in a society, suggesting that we were 
each of us not simply in danger but fundamentally alone. It was a 
message that was both resonant and at odds with the times. I still 
remember it as if it were yesterday, even though I was much younger then 
than almost all of you are now.
    Modern technology was connecting everyone even then with the 
television set, a telephone, and an automobile. New highways let us 
reach out to each other faster than ever before. Rockets were already 
taking astronauts into space; even the moon was getting closer. These 
new inventions made the world a smaller place. We were becoming more 
aware of the great diversity of America, of people who lived beyond the 
borders of our neighborhoods or past the railroad tracks at the quiet 
end of town. More Americans of more race and backgrounds than ever 
before even then could chase the promise that lay before them. Young 
families left their streets or their farms in search of better jobs in 
the cities; factories hummed; industries then, as now again, were the 
envy of the world. But the unintended result of all this chasing around 
is that we became uprooted. The more folks moved around, the more they 
became strangers to their neighbors. More doors were shut; more locks 
were bought and turned; more curtains were drawn as they were on the 
night that Kitty Genovese was killed. On that night, it was as if the 
value of responsibility had already come to mean only responsibility for 
yourself.
    Four years after that incident, a young United States Senator from 
New York, running for the office I now hold, said this, ``The real 
threat of crime is what it does to ourselves and our communities. No 
nation hiding behind locked doors is free, for it is imprisoned by its 
own fear. A nation which surrenders to crime is a society which has 
resigned itself to failure. Thus, the fight against crime is, in the 
last analysis, the same as the fight for equal opportunity or the battle 
against hunger and deprivation or the struggle to prevent the pollution 
of our air and water. It is a fight to preserve the quality of 
community, which is at the root of our greatness, a fight to reserve 
confidence in ourselves and our fellow citizens, a battle for the 
quality of our lives.''
    Two months later the man who spoke those words, Senator Robert 
Kennedy, himself lay slain. And a line of mourners more than a mile long 
wrapped around St. Patrick's Cathedral, tied to his coffin in their 
common grief but still too far apart from one another.
    Many, many times in the years since, in this city and in others, we 
have honored memories of the fallen. But we have failed to heed their 
warnings or finish their work. Time after time, we hear the lonesome 
sound of pipes at the funeral of a police officer killed in the line of 
duty. We hear the soft sobs of a mother burying another child gunned 
down on another city playground or in another school. We read the tragic 
news of the young student shot while simply riding a van across the 
Brooklyn Bridge.
    This very morning back in Washington, people are reading about how 
one student shot another student four times yesterday in an argument 
arising out of the fact that they bumped into each other in a school 
hallway in what we all thought was perhaps our safest public high school 
in Washington.
    Too often our reaction to the violence is to simply hunker down and 
turn our backs, raise the drawbridge, buy a better lock, and leave the 
problem to others: the thin line of blue or the gray mass of government.
    Justice Edwin Torres who grew up in the barrio and is now a justice 
of the New York supreme court, sees this problem in his courtroom every 
day, and he wrote a stunning letter to Senator Moynihan not too long ago 
in which he described people so beaten down by the daily barrage of 
violence that they almost apologize for being the victims--as if you 
were smart enough or strong enough, no matter how bad things got, you 
could just figure out a way not to be a victim.
    No citizen of this great Nation should ever have to apologize for 
that. And no American should live in fear. No one should surrender to 
any of this for a moment. And so I come to you to ask for your help and 
those like you all across America to take back our neighborhoods, to 
take back our future, to take back the basic quality of our lives.
    Thirty years ago, if Kitty Genovese's murder taught us that we can't 
look away, the years since surely teach us that we cannot look to

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others. Thirty years ago, her life might have been saved if she had 
simply called--or had someone, who was looking at the whole thing 
unfold, called the local police. Today even that is not enough. We have 
to help, each and every one of us, to reclaim our streets, our schools, 
our communities, and our lives.
    This is not a call for blind heroics but practical action if we want 
to save our own citizenship. I have met some heroes who deserve our 
praise. I met, when I came to New York a few weeks ago, the three men 
who subdued the gunman on the Long Island Railroad. I met in Ohio just 3 
weeks ago Anne Ross from Dayton, who organized a neighborhood group to 
sweep drugs off their streets. They've taken down the numbers of license 
plates of drug dealers. They've shared photographs of dealers with the 
police. They've shut down crack houses and turned them over to families 
who don't deal drugs or use them, all the while having their lives 
threatened, she, her husband, and the others who she's mobilized.
    Two weeks ago in Chicago, I met a woman named Carol Ridley, whose 
own son was shot by someone who said he was his son's best friend, when 
the boy was only 22, in a foolish argument. But instead of withdrawing 
into her own grief, she's gone outward, working in Save the Children 
seminars to try to stop children from killing other children, to try to 
end the madness of all these weapons being in the hands of people who 
shouldn't have them, and to try to teach young people that there are 
other ways in which they can deal with their anger and frustration.
    These ordinary people have done extraordinary things. The first is 
to prove that there can be something more powerful than fear, and that 
is our will and our collective ability to change the way things are. We 
have reached a time when we have to change not only our laws--not only 
the Brady bill and the crime bill and put more police on the street--
we're got to change the basic attitudes of this country, not only about 
crime and violence but about how we think about ourselves and one 
another.
    None of us any longer can pretend not to hear these cries for help, 
and each of us has a serious personal responsibility to do our part. 
Government cannot do this job alone; neither can the police forces 
themselves. But together there are things we can do, and one of the best 
is this new national service program, AmeriCorps.
    It represents the best of our country. It will give Americans, 
especially the young, a chance to serve our Nation by helping their 
communities, helping to make our schools and streets safer, immunizing 
our babies and turning our children into better students, cleaning up 
our parks, and caring for the elderly.
    Today we'll hear from Americans from all walks of life who are as 
different in background, age, and experiences as the AmeriCorps can 
possibly be. Some will have had the fabric of their lives ripped by 
crime. But what makes them alike, and what makes me so hopeful, is that 
out of their tragedies they each made a choice to make a difference.
    As extraordinary as their stories are, keep this in mind: There are 
thousands, indeed tens of thousands, legions more like them everywhere 
in this country, in every community: ordinary Americans doing 
extraordinary things, Americans reconnecting others in their 
communities. That's what AmeriCorps is all about. For all the miracles 
of mankind's technology and discovery, nothing, still, nothing connects 
us to one another like an outstretched hand, an open heart, and the 
certainty that each of us has made a difference.
    We will make a difference if we can give our people something to say 
yes to, introduce them to people they can look up to, give them a chance 
to live and learn the meaning of responsibility and opportunity and 
community.
    When I was a young man, I read a book by a fellow southerner named 
James Agee, called ``Let Us Now Praise Famous Men''. It was the story of 
desperately, desperately poor people in my region of the country, the 
South, during the Great Depression. It remains a book as powerful today 
as it was the day it was written. You cannot imagine, I don't think, 
what it was like to live in times when whole States had half the people 
living below the poverty line, when there were massive stretches of 
communities where more than half the people were out of work, where 
people could only eat because they were able to grow a little food in 
the ground that they held on to.
    And in that time, James Agee wrote this, and I think it is something 
that we ought to remember as we drive up and down Flatbush Avenue in 
Brooklyn. Listen to this: ``In every child who is born, under no matter 
what circumstances

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and no matter what parents, the potentiality of the whole human race is 
born again. And in him, too, once more, and of each of us, our terrific 
responsibility toward human life, toward the utmost idea of goodness, of 
the horror of error, and of God.''
    It is not enough for any of us ever to say again what was said here 
30 years ago, ``I don't want to get involved.'' We must not only want to 
get involved; we must be involved. We must be good neighbors again. And 
in being good neighbors, we will reclaim for ourselves the promise of 
this great Nation.
    Thank you all, and God bless you.

[At this point, an audience member asked why the President had not 
publicly supported AIDS legislation introduced by Representative Jerrold 
Nadler.]

    The President. I'll be glad to talk to Mr. Nadler about that. Every 
time----
    Audience member. Have you--[inaudible]?
    The President. No. Nobody has ever mentioned it to me before. But 
let me say this----
    Audience member. [Inaudible]--about this plan.
    The President. I've listened to you. Will you listen to me? Will you 
listen to me? I've listened to you. It is always convenient to me, when 
you interrupt my meetings, how often you ignore what has been done: the 
first AIDS czar, the first time we have ever had a really national 
strategy, dramatic increases in funding in research, dramatic increases 
in funding in funds to care for people with AIDS, dramatic increases in 
efforts to prevent AIDS from occurring. We are doing far more than has 
ever been done before.
    I will be happy----
    Audience member.  Why haven't--[inaudible]?
    The President. Listen to me. I've listened to you. I let you 
interrupt this meeting, and I let you talk. And you have taken up all 
the time of all the people that are in here.
    Audience member. I let you speak.
    The President. No, you haven't. You're trying to interrupt me. They 
let me speak. They invited me here, not you. I have told you, I will be 
glad to discuss this--[inaudible]--no, leave him alone. Don't hurt him. 
Don't hurt him. He's got a right to be here.
    Audience member. [Inaudible]--is in Congress--[inaudible]--why 
aren't you supporting this? It is a crime.
    Audience member. Welcome to Brooklyn. [Laughter]
    The President. What did he say? I didn't hear.
    Audience member. Welcome to Brooklyn.
    The President. Let me ask you this: Wouldn't you rather have him in 
here asking me to do something than standing outside convinced I 
wouldn't do anything, no matter what? [Applause] It's America.
    Go on, Eli.

[Eli J. Segal, Assistant to the President for National Service, 
discussed public safety concerns and then introduced Chicago police 
chief Matt L. Rodriguez and San Diego police officer Andy Mill, who 
discussed community policing. Mr. Segal then asked if the President had 
questions or comments.]

    The President. Well, I wanted to say, first of all, how much I 
appreciate your being here and how much I appreciate hearing from police 
officers that there's something for the community to do with the police, 
and specifically, the details that you recommended.
    I don't think I can overstate the importance of having a presence on 
the streets and in the neighborhoods and the communities, either by 
having volunteers do what Chief Rodriguez said and go behind the scenes 
so more police officers can be out there, or having senior volunteers or 
others walking the streets. We have a lot of evidence that this helps 
prevent crime in the first place. We're not talking about just catching 
criminals; we're talking about recreating a sense of order, reminding 
people of what the rules of society are, just sort of physically being 
there. There's a lot of evidence that that reduces crime.
    And you mentioned that I had the New York City police officer, Kevin 
Jett, down to the State of the Union Address, recognized him. And we 
brought him back to the White House afterward and had a nice talk with 
him. And he talked a lot about that, about how he saw a big part of his 
job as stopping crime in the first place by just being there and know 
what was going on.
    The second thing I want to say is, it's easy to underestimate, I 
think, how much ordinary citizens can do. In Chicago, I have actually 
been in some of your housing projects where welfare mothers got their 
first jobs in the projects, patrolling the stairs, and getting discounts 
on their rent, among other things, in return for working,

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patrolling the stairs. But it all worked together to make these housing 
projects crime-free instead of places of fear.
    So I guess I just want to thank you and to--the one thing that I 
would like to ask as a practical matter is how you think we can best 
assure that--and I'm going to lead you, but I know you want this--one of 
the things that always bothers me is when we--Mr. Schumer knows this--we 
pass a bill through Congress, the temptation is to say exactly how the 
money ought to be spent that we're appropriating. And it appears to me, 
just from the two different cases that the two of you cited, drastically 
different, that we ought to make community policing money available with 
as much flexibility as possible, because New York's idea about how to 
handle this may be different from San Diego's or Chicago's.
    And so maybe you should comment on that. I think it's important that 
we send a clear signal. We don't want to tie the hands of the local 
officers too much.

[Chief Rodriguez concurred with the President's statement supporting 
local control of resources, and Officer Mill discussed other aspects of 
community policing.]

    The President. I just want to reemphasize what these two guys have 
said. Now, here are people who are spending their lives in law 
enforcement. And as Governor--I know I've had this conversation with 
Governor Cuomo before, that all the bills I have signed--I was a 
Governor for 12 years before I became President--I have signed bill 
after bill after bill building more prison space, having longer 
sentences for serious crimes. I watched the average amount of time 
served by an inmate go up rather dramatically during my term as 
Governor. I saw the reintroduction of capital punishment after years in 
which we didn't have it. I understand all about this punishment 
business, but if you look at it, the crime rate still keeps getting 
worse. What lowers the crime rate is the involvement of the community 
and the intelligent and adequate allocation of police resources.
    And I think it is very important that you understand this is not 
just idle rhetoric. I mean, these people have put their lives on the 
line for years and years and years. They know what they are talking 
about. We have to reclaim our streets and lower the crime rate through 
people like you supporting the kinds of ideas that they put out. This is 
not soft; this is hard. This is save yourself by rebuilding your 
community.
    I thank you both very much for that.

[Mr. Segal invited the audience to ask questions.]

    The President. Would you introduce yourself and say where you're 
from if you ask a question in the audience?
    Q. Certainly. My name is Ray Owens. I'm a native of Austin, Texas, 
here--live now in the New York area. And I'm with Teach For America, Mr. 
President----
    The President. Good for you. Great program.
    Q. ----a national teaching corps, yes. And as you well know, we're 
the national teaching corps that's sending talented teachers who are 
accepting the responsibility to teach and serve in communities and 
neighborhoods that some educators have refused to work in, in great part 
because of the crime there. So in this regard, indeed, there are a 
number of people who still say that community policing is really more 
about community relations than it is about reducing crime.
    I'm wondering how we can be sure that there's real substance in our 
community policing efforts.
    The President. I think the best way to be sure of it is, first, to 
give as much--to go back to what--and keep in mind, this is a very 
appropriate question because Mr. Schumer's congressional subcommittee, 
I'll say again, is going to deal with this issue tomorrow. They are 
marking this bill up tomorrow. So this is a timely question.
    My own judgment is, the best way is to say, here are the results we 
want to achieve. That is, we want the community involved; we want 
volunteers to be able to participate; we want each city or community to 
be able to define that however they want, except we're going to measure 
the results.
    I think the main way to do it is not to tell everybody on the front 
end how they have to do it with a whole bunch of rules and regulations, 
but to cite some examples that have worked and then say we're going to 
measure results.
    There are more than one way to do this. I mean, in the city of 
Houston, they had a 22-percent decline in the murder rate and a 27-
percent decline in the crime rate in one year when they went to a 
community policing situation. I mean, 15 months, in a 15-month period.

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Not surprisingly, the mayor was reelected with 91 percent of the vote, 
because they went to a community policing strategy that worked.
    So my own judgment is, give the people who are on the ground and who 
have the biggest stake in the success of this the power to design the 
program, and then reward those programs that work and don't continue 
those programs that don't. I think you have to measure the results, 
because everyplace is going to be different.

[Geoffrey Canada, director, Rheedlan Center for Children and Families, 
New York City; Kevin Stansberry, youth service leader for the Safe 
Schools and Urban Schools Service Corps, Red Bank, NJ; and Frankie Rios, 
youth service leader, Safe Places, the Bronx, NY, spoke about their 
community programs.]

    The President. Let me just ask all of you a little bit--you could 
see how moved this audience was by the sort of personal testimony that 
each of you gave. One of the problems that I see with our national 
service program, because no program can do everything, is that we can 
provide volunteers to a community to support a program like yours if 
it's already going on. But not every community has somebody who would 
give up a career in corporate America, where you could make more money, 
and decide to do this.
    And one of the things that I'd like to just explore with you is what 
you think the national service organization can do--because we are a 
national organization, and we have high visibility, and I do events like 
this all the time--what can we do to make sure that there are more 
programs like this out in the community so that we can steer the 
volunteers to them. I mean, if you don't exist, then the volunteers 
won't go there.
    Now, there's a Boys and Girls Club nearly everywhere, and so they 
just need to organize themselves everywhere to take the volunteers. But 
there isn't necessarily a program to keep the schools safe or to keep 
the corridors safe going to and from school. That is a huge deal. In a 
lot of places where even the schools themselves are safe, the kids are 
very much at risk going to and from school. And I've had people talk to 
me about that all over the country.
    So do you have any advice for me about how we can help to sort of 
replicate these programs so we can direct the volunteers to them?

[Messrs. Canada, Stansberry, and Rios discussed community organization 
and infrastructure in dealing with community issues.]

    The President. I think if you've got a place, then the people will 
come and the programs will spring up, and they will do it. One of the 
things I wanted to say in support of that, because Mr. Schumer and I 
talked about it on the way up here, you may remember that a few weeks 
ago, maybe it's been a couple of months ago now, Reverend Jesse Jackson 
had a national meeting in Washington of the Rainbow Coalition group to 
talk about violence. And he called me--we've had now two conversations--
we had a brief talk about it yesterday. He started kind of doing an 
inventory in Washington and then asked some people about it in New York, 
about how many schools there were that didn't have real recreational 
opportunities for kids, especially if they weren't on athletic teams 
anymore.
    And he went through an inventory with me just in Washington about, 
for example, within the city limits how many baseball fields there were 
that were really functioning and how there was no equipment for kids, 
and how many kids there were that never had a baseball bat in their 
hands until they were 14 or 15 years old now, and no swimming pools, no 
organized basketball programs, no bowling alleys, no skating rinks; 
these kinds of things.
    I think we have maybe underestimated that in the last 15 years that 
our schools and our cities have been under such enormous financial 
pressures to cut back, cut back, cut back, maybe without even thinking 
about it, since these recreational programs for kids at large--not the 
stars on the athletic teams, but the kids at large--have been maybe the 
easiest things to cut. And one of the things that we talked about is 
whether we could have some of this national service money directed back 
to support these school-based programs so that you'll have something to 
do with the kids and have these activities. I think it's really 
important.

[Clementine Barfield, president, Save Our Sons and Daughters, discussed 
community crisis intervention and victim assistance, and Elizabeth 
Mathews, VISTA volunteer, discussed shelter and support for battered 
women and their children.]

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    Mr. Segal. Mr. President, do you have any questions or concerns? I 
saw you scribbling down there some thoughts.
    The President. No, actually, I was just scribbling what I was 
learning from them, not what questions I wanted to ask.
    I do want to say that each of you, in very different ways, is an 
incredibly powerful example, and I'm just, I can't say enough about it. 
I was very moved by both of you for very different reasons, but you were 
very powerful.
    I want you to know that my--that before I became President, when I 
was still living at home in Arkansas, my wife and I spent a lot of time, 
a huge--a lot of time for what we had available with a friend of ours 
who ran a shelter like the one in which you work. And we saw large 
numbers, especially around holiday times, of women and children horribly 
brutalized. And I just would like to say that one of the things you 
said, that I think we may miss in this--and another thing you said in 
terms of sympathy for the people who commit these crimes and then go to 
jail--is we've got to do something that changes the attitudes of people 
who think that the only way they can deal with their frustration and 
anger is to wreak violence on someone.
    Now, if they do something really terrible, we have to punish them 
and send them to prison and do all that. But there are a lot of these 
people who can be reached before they do something really terrible. A 
lot of these children who knife and shoot other children are people who 
have never learned to deal with their anger or their anxiety in any 
other way. To them, the future is what happens 5 or 10 or 20 minutes 
from now, instead of what happens 5 or 10 or 20 years from now.
    And so, I don't know what thoughts you have on that, but that's one 
thing I am continuously plagued by. I see people like you who come in 
and bravely give your lives to try to help people who are so savaged by 
this. And then I know that a lot of the people we're dealing with now, 
who perpetrate these kinds of crimes, themselves were the victims of 
domestic violence when they were young, themselves grew up in kind of 
chaotic and violent situations, and they have no other conditioned way 
to respond to these terrible things that happen to them. And I hope we 
can devote some time and attention to that.

[Ms. Barfield discussed creating a climate of peace, and Ms. Mathews 
discussed the need to prevent violence. Molly Baldwin, director, Reach 
Out to Chelsea Adolescents, Chelsea, MA, and Sherman Spears, youth 
service leader, Oakland, CA, then discussed conflict resolution among 
youth.]

    The President. We don't want to let anybody off the hook here today. 
You know, no one has mentioned this, but one of the things that--one of 
the gentlemen did mention the images that come across to kids. But if 
you look at the cumulative, instantaneous, reactive, macho violence you 
see in media entertainment programs, you know, it's not that one or two 
programs will change a kid's attitude, but the amount of it overall, I 
think, has a big impact.
    And I also think when people turn on television and they see their 
National Government, what do you inevitably see? People with words, 
using extreme words to characterize conduct or activity or positions. 
The other politicians do it, the media do it, always trying to twist it 
like taffy to the nth degree. I don't know how many people--I've had 
older Members of the Congress tell me just in the last week how much 
meaner and partisan and negative the national arena is. Mr. Schumer was 
commenting sadly on it on the way in here today. So I think all of us in 
positions of public responsibility need to think about that, need to 
think about what kind of message are we sending to young people when 
they see that kind of conduct.
    Look, if he, this fine young man here, can bury his anger and desire 
for revenge, he ought to be an example to all the rest of us who have so 
much less to be angry about. Next time I want to get real mad, I'm going 
to think about you. And I hope everybody else in this country will. I 
thank you. You have no idea what a powerful example you are.

[A New York State Assemblyman asked about allocating money to States for 
education rather than for building prisons.]

    The President. I'll say this: One big problem is, you know, that you 
can go into a Federal court and get an order to build a new prison and 
make it nice. Prisons not only have better schools than a lot of 
schools, they have, almost unfailingly, any prison built in the last 10 
years has better recreational facilities than a public school or than a 
local park. The New York

[[Page 427]]

Times Sunday magazine had a stunning pictorial--I don't know how many of 
you saw it--pictorial exhibit a couple of weeks ago showing the prison 
and how beautiful they were and the schools and how rundown they were. 
So we have to try to change that. All I can tell you is if you look at 
what we're trying to do with the crime bill, we're trying to give some 
resources to the States and to the communities to begin to turn that 
around.
    I also think--look, let's go back to the police officers that 
started this. None of us want to be naive about this. Some people 
deserve to be punished and should be behind bars. But we do know that a 
very large percentage of the truly violent crimes are committed by a 
fairly small percentage of the criminals. So what we have to do is to 
try to identify the people that should be incarcerated and incarcerate 
them, have more community-based punishment for people that do less 
serious things, and try to do all the stuff you all have been here 
talking about today. And there ought to be some way of allocating the 
resources that recognizes the importance of doing all three things, 
instead of just that one thing. But there is no--the practical problem 
is that in the last 10 to 15 years, there's not only been an upsurge of 
violent crime, which has led us to build more prison cells, there's also 
been a huge spate of lawsuits, which have gotten us to build prisons 
nicer than our schools. And it's crazy; our priorities, therefore, have 
been turned upside-down. Our schools should be nicer than our prisons so 
people want to get into the schools. And I really think that's a 
problem.
    Now, that's not to say I don't think there shouldn't be educational 
facilities in the prisons or recreational facilities. I do. I think it's 
crazy to turn people back out of prison when they're illiterate, when 
they won't have a chance to do well. I'm not campaigning against prison 
reform. I'm just pointing out just what you did. We haven't done enough 
to help the kids stay out in the first place.

[A participant discussed domestic violence. Another participant 
discussed gangs and asked how society should deal with gang members and 
gang violence.]

    The President. Well, my short answer is--I mean it's something we 
could talk about all day long, but I've spent a good deal of time 
talking with former gang members, with some present gang members. I've 
spent more time than Presidents usually do in inner-city areas, and I've 
thought about this a lot and talked to a lot of people who work on it. I 
mean, I think we heard a lot about it today. I think, first of all, you 
have to try to create the conditions for kids when they're young so they 
don't do that. There has to be alternative things.
    Keep in mind, a lot of gangs grow up in a vacuum. Everybody that was 
introduced up here is a member of a gang. All these people who started 
organizations, that's what those organizations are, they're good gangs. 
Isn't that right? Isn't that right? I mean, every one of them, right? 
That is, we all want to be part of something that's bigger than 
ourselves, where we're really important because we're part of it, right? 
We do. This Public Allies, that's a good gang. That's what it is. It's 
something good that's wholesome and--[applause]. So if you live in a 
neighborhood where families have broken down, where there are no jobs 
and opportunities, where the school system is dysfunctional, where 
there's not a strong sense of community, somebody is going to organize 
something so people can be part of something, where they are important, 
and they matter.
    And I think we have to recognize that, and we have to adopt some of 
these strategies to deal with it. Unfortunately--I mean, there are lots 
of things a President can do. You know, we can pass these programs and 
make these opportunities available. But in the end, people get saved the 
same way they get lost, one by one. And that's why all of you are so 
important to this. And that's why the power of his example--one 
picture--if somebody puts his picture in some newspaper in America 
tomorrow, talking about your story, it will be worth more words than I 
can spew out in 2 weeks or 2 years. And that's why I think the genius of 
this national service program is having more folks like you show up in 
good gangs to help to decide, community by community, how to create 
another way of life for all these folks. And you decide how it is. It 
will be different for different people in different places and different 
circumstances. And you will make the decision. And all the Government 
will do is to empower more of you to be out there. That's what the whole 
national service thing is about.

[Mr. Segal closed the forum and asked the President to make final 
remarks.]

[[Page 428]]

    The President. Let me say first, I want to thank all the New York 
officials who came, including one I did not introduce, Alan Hevesi, the 
city comptroller. I want to thank all the people from volunteer groups 
who came. And especially, I want to thank my good friend Kathleen 
Kennedy Townsend, whose father's speech I quoted tonight, who has 
devoted her life to community service. Thank you for being here. And 
Eli, since you're giving your life to community service and you grew up 
in this community, I want to introduce your mother, who raised you in 
this neighborhood. Thank you for coming.
    The one last message I want to leave all of you with is I want to 
thank all of you who are part of these efforts. You are conducting a 
quiet and sometimes not-so-quiet revolution in this country. The purpose 
of national service is to swell your numbers and increase your impact 
and give this country back to the people who want America to go on to 
the next century as the greatest country in the world and want to give 
every child a chance to live up to his or her God-given potential. That 
is what this is about.
    So my last word is this: We need more of you. And anybody within the 
sound of my voice, we want you to call, find out about national service, 
find out about the community groups in your community, sign up, and do 
something. We can change America.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 12:21 p.m. in the Center for Performing 
Arts, Brooklyn College. In his remarks, he referred to Vernon Latting, 
president of the college, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Deputy 
Assistant Attorney General and daughter of Robert F. Kennedy.