[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[April 11, 1994]
[Pages 664-667]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to Law Enforcement Officers
April 11, 1994

    Thank you very much, Officer Williams, if you just keep doing your 
work, and I'll be glad to carry your notebook anytime. There are a lot 
of days when you do more than we do up here anyway. [Laughter] I want to 
thank you, and thank you, Earline Williams, for your commitment and your 
remarkable statement and the work you and your husband are doing. Thank 
you, Eddie, for reminding us that we have an obligation to fight for 
your future. Thanks for bringing your friends, and thank you, officers, 
for giving him something to look up to and believe in. I want to welcome 
the new officers from Albany, Georgia, and thank them for their 
commitment to law enforcement and thank all the other people in law 
enforcement who are here at the local and State and Federal level.
    In the last congressional recess, like the Attorney General, I got 
out around the country and listened to people, talked to them about a 
lot of issues. And I found that all over the country in every region, 
among people from all walks of life, all races and income groups and 
political parties, there is a deep concern about the tide of crime and 
violence in this country and about the underlying strains on our fabric 
as a common people that these have imposed.
    We have simply got to do everything we can to move forward in 
helping the American people to reduce crime, to say no to those things 
which they ought to say no to, and to give our young people some more 
things to say yes to.
    I came here today to emphasize how terribly important it is that the 
House of Representatives consider the crime bill immediately on its 
return. The Speaker has agreed to do that. I then want the Senate and 
the House to get together and resolve their differences and send me the 
crime bill as soon as possible. The American people have waited long 
enough. We don't need to waste their time with frivolous or political 
amendments and delay. We don't need to take months on a task that can be 
done in a couple of weeks. If the bill is on my desk in weeks, I will 
only take a minute to sign it, and then the American people will begin 
to have the tools they need to solve so many of their problems.
    This has been a good year for us in this country. Our deficit is 
going down, and our economy is going up. Twice as many private sector 
jobs have come into this economy in the last 14 months than in the 
previous 4 years. After 7 years of gridlock, the Brady bill became the 
Brady law and is already working to stop felons and fugitives from 
purchasing handguns. And I'm proud that it was passed with the help of 
America's law enforcement officers.
    But everything that we are trying to do to move this country forward 
and to bring this country together will be undermined unless we can give 
the American people a greater sense that they are secure in their homes, 
on their streets, and in their schools. The number of murders has 
tripled since 1960; so has the number of crimes per uniformed police 
officer. Death by gunfire will soon surpass death by car accidents. 
Almost a third of all of our families have had someone victimized by 
crime. Today, one in 20 American children carry a weapon to school, and 
over 150,000 stay home every day because they're afraid of what might 
happen to them in school.
    We know the crime bill cannot solve all these problems. We know many 
of them will have to be solved by those people who are here today in 
uniform and people like them and the friends and neighbors they have, 
like Mrs. Williams. We know that. We know that unless there are

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young people like Eddie and his friends who are willing to work and be 
role models themselves and make something of their own lives, that 
everything we do here in Washington will be limited. But we know, too, 
that we have to take the lead, we have to take the initiative, and that 
we can give people like these people the tools they need to seize 
control of their lives and make their communities safer and better 
places to learn, to work, and to grow.
    The crime bill provides funding for another 100,000 police officers 
over 5 years for community policing because it works. It will make a 
difference. You already heard what Officer Williams said about 12 
officers in Albany, Georgia. The mayor of Houston put 655 more police 
officers on the beat. In 15 months, crime dropped 22 percent; murders 
went down 27 percent.
    This can be done everywhere. This bill with community policing will 
help the police officers of our country not only to catch more criminals 
and put them behind bars but to reduce crime and to connect with more 
young people before it's too late. I was very moved by what Eddie said 
about his attitude about the police, because of the work of these two 
fine police officers. We know that crime can be reduced and that lives 
can be enhanced. So as the Attorney General said, policing is a big part 
of this crime bill.
    If Congress passes the bill soon to give the American people more 
police officers, I'll make this commitment to you: I'll cut through the 
bureaucracy and the redtape in Washington so that within a year, 20,000 
of these new officers will actually be hired and trained and working to 
make our streets safer. If they'll send me the bill, we'll cut the 
redtape. No more politics in Congress; no more redtape in the 
bureaucracy. Let's give the police to the American people, and let's do 
it this year.
    The second thing this bill is about is punishment. And I want to 
emphasize, if I might, three things. There's been a great deal of debate 
and much honest disagreement about whether we ought to have some sort of 
``three strikes and you're out'' bill. I would like to make two points 
about that, as someone who started my public career as a State attorney 
general almost two decades ago now. First of all, an overwhelming 
percentage of the really serious violent crimes are committed by a 
relatively few people. Even a small percentage of the criminals in our 
country commit an overwhelming percentage of the really serious violent 
crimes. Secondly, this law is designed to be directed, if it's properly 
drawn, against a narrow class of people, those who do not commit crimes 
for which it's already ``one strike and you're out.'' Keep in mind, many 
of our crimes today can get you a life sentence or a very long sentence 
just by doing it one time. But there are people that are clearly and 
demonstrably highly likely to take life or to commit serious, horrible 
crimes--we know them by their profiles--who do things which clearly 
indicate this, and still they can wind up being paroled after relatively 
modest sentences.
    This bill is designed, if properly drawn--and the Attorney General 
has done a fine job of working on the bill that is coming through the 
House--to be directed against that narrow class of people. I do think 
those folks, you can say, ``If you do this three times, we do not think 
you should be paroled.'' And I believe it will enable us, for those who 
think this is too harsh, to create more enlightened attitudes about 
other people who may be put in prison for too long a period of time or 
who may need alternative rehabilitation strategies. But these police 
officers are out there putting their lives on the line, oftentimes in 
the face of people who are back on the street that they know are highly 
likely to do something that is life-threatening.
    So respectfully, I dispute those who believe that we can't have a 
``three strikes and you're out'' law that is good, that is properly 
drawn, and that makes a difference. We shouldn't let a small percentage 
of even the criminal population terrorize the country if we can find a 
way to stop it. And this is our best effort.
    The second point I want to make is that this bill does some other 
things about punishment, too. This bill encourages States and localities 
to find alternative punishments for first-time, nonviolent offenders, 
for young people, boot camps or other kinds of community-based programs 
which may reconnect people to their communities before it is too late 
and which will give them a chance not only to be punished but to learn 
something while they're doing their respective sentences. So this is a 
smart punishment bill.
    The third thing this bill is about is prevention. We know these 
programs work, too, especially for young people. And I want to say a 
special word of thanks here to the Attorney General.

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When I appointed her, I wanted someone who had actual experience on the 
front lines fighting crime and who understood that you have to be both 
tough and smart. And her relentless, constant, compassionate but tough-
minded advocacy for a sensible prevention strategy is critical to the 
fact that we now have about a billion dollars in this plan for jobs for 
young people in high crime neighborhoods and recreation programs and 
summer programs and opportunities for young people to bond with caring, 
concerned adults who care about their future. I thank her for that. And 
that's a very important part of this bill. It will make a huge 
difference to the young people of America.
    A big part of that is making the schools safe and drug-free and free 
of violence again. If our children can't be safe in school and going to 
and from school, they're going to have a very hard time. After all, a 
lot of the young people most at risk of being victims of crime, as well 
as at risk of becoming criminals at a young age, live in communities 
very different from those that most of us grew up in, communities where 
the family structure has been weakened, communities where other 
organizations are weaker than they once were, and communities in which 
there is almost no work for people to do. When you take work and 
community and family out of a neighborhood, you create an awful vacuum 
in which only bad things, only bad things, can occur unless someone 
moves in to fill the vacuum.
    Our schools are trying. But we are asking them to do in many of our 
communities today, we are asking them to do things that no one ever 
thought the schools could do alone. And we have got to continue to 
support them through these safe school initiatives and the other 
prevention plans. So that's what we're trying to do in this crime bill: 
more police, more punishment, more prevention.
    In this time of budgetary constraints, the very idea that we're 
about to pass a program that will involve over $20 billion in new money 
is an astonishing thing. It's a lot more money for State and local 
initiatives, but we have to do it. And I am proud of the fact that it is 
going to be paid for, not with a tax increase but with the phase-down of 
the Federal Government. We are reducing over a 5-year period the size of 
the Federal bureaucracy by about 250,000 people. And all the savings are 
going to go on into a trust fund to pay for this crime bill, so that at 
the end of 5 years we will have a Federal Government that is as small as 
it was when President Kennedy was in office. And the money saved from 
that downsizing will be giving our communities a chance to give our kids 
a future and our people a chance to be safe on the streets. I think 
that's a pretty good switch, and I appreciate the initiative in doing 
it.
    Let me say again in closing, there is not a moment to lose. People 
are trying everywhere to do something about this, and everywhere they 
are being frustrated. The case of the Chicago Housing Authority has been 
in the news because just a few days ago, a Federal district court 
declared that the housing authority's own policy of sweeping their units 
for guns, for ineligible people living there, and for drugs was 
unconstitutional. As soon as I heard about that, I asked the Attorney 
General and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Henry 
Cisneros, to develop another policy that is constitutional and 
effective, because I have been to the Chicago housing projects. And I 
have been in the places where the sweeps occurred and where the housing 
units were cleaned up and where the people who were living in the 
housing units were hired to work with the police to ride up in the 
elevator and walk down the stairs and keep the places clean. And I saw 
children pouring out of housing units, pouring out, to run up to the 
head of the Chicago Housing Authority, Vince Lane, as if he were their 
savior because he simply gave them a safe place to live.
    So does this administration want to follow the Constitution of the 
United States? You bet we do. But I can't believe that we can't find a 
way to have a constitutional search of places that we know are full of 
victims of crime because they harbor criminals. We are going to find a 
way to solve this problem.
    Thirteen people died in Chicago violently last weekend, three of 
them in the Robert Taylor Homes project. Last night Secretary Cisneros 
spent the night in that project, and he called me today from there, and 
we had a conversation about this. He and the Attorney General are 
working on it. But I say this just to make this point: Those folks 
living out there in that housing project, most of them are not 
criminals; most of them are good people. They obey the law. They're 
doing the best they can to raise their children. They deserve our best 
and our quickest efforts.

[[Page 667]]

    So I say to you again in closing, I thank you for coming here, but 
we know we're all preaching to the saved today. Tomorrow when the 
Congress comes back, there are many other things that will claim their 
attention. I will ask them to think about many other things. You must 
say, ``Pass the crime bill now.''
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 12:36 p.m. at the Department of Justice. In 
his remarks, he referred to Ernest Williams, veteran police lieutenant, 
Albany, GA; Earline Williams, longtime volunteer for the Trenton, NJ, 
police department; and Eddie Cutanda, 15-year-old beneficiary of Boston, 
MA, community policing programs.