[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[April 14, 1994]
[Pages 695-697]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 695]]


Remarks to Mayors and Law Enforcement Officials
April 14, 1994

    The President. Thank you very much. Thank you. Please be seated. 
Thank you very much.
    Ladies and gentlemen, as some of you may know, early this morning 
two American helicopters, flying in northern Iraq as part of Operation 
Provide Comfort to provide humanitarian relief to the Kurdish population 
there, were mistakenly shot down in a tragic accident by two United 
States jet fighters who thought they were Iraqi helicopters illegally in 
the area.
    This is a terrible tragedy for the families involved and for the 
people in the Armed Forces who have courageously tried to protect the 
Kurds for many years now. And I would like to ask that, since so many of 
you put your lives on the line every day, we open this ceremony with a 
moment of silent prayer for those who lost their lives, their families, 
and their loved ones.

[After a moment of silence, the following persons made brief remarks: 
Mayor Jerry Abramson of Louisville, KY; Sgt. Marc Lawson of the Atlanta, 
GA, Police Department; Mayor Sharpe James of Newark, NJ; Mayor Richard 
Daley of Chicago, IL; and Mayor Richard Riordan of Los Angeles, CA.]

    The President. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mayor Riordan, Mayor 
Abramson, Mayor James, Mayor Daley. Sergeant Lawson, you gave a great 
talk today, and you represented people in law enforcement very well, and 
we thank you especially for being here. To Attorney General Reno and the 
other Federal officials who are here, all the distinguished mayors, the 
leaders of our law enforcement organizations, and all of you in law 
enforcement, I thank those of you on the front lines of fighting the 
crime problem for coming here to Washington today to urge Congress to 
pass the crime bill now and without delay.
    Behind me stand people who represent, not only by their own 
courageous deeds but by the uniforms they wear, the heroes of law 
enforcement who stand behind all the rest of us every day, people who 
wake up every morning, put on a uniform, and put their lives on the line 
to protect our safety. There are nearly 100 of them from every State in 
America. They do good work. They can not only catch criminals, they can 
prevent crime. And that's why we want to put another 100,000 like them 
on our streets over the next 5 years.
    Last week, I was in communities all across America like those 
represented here today. The Attorney General was, too. And everywhere 
people wanted to talk about the crime problem, about the violence, about 
the tearing away of the future of so many children's lives.
    When you go to Capitol Hill today, tell Congress that the people you 
and I work for have waited long enough. The people don't care about 
amendments that could slow the process down. They don't want partisan 
bickering. They want the bill certainly to be reviewed carefully and to 
be honestly debated, but this is not a problem, as Mayor Riordan so 
eloquently said, that the American people see in terms of partisan 
advantages.
    Nearly one-third of all American families--Democrats, Republicans, 
and independents, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, you name 
it--all of us, we share a common curse: In the most wonderful country in 
the world, we have the highest violent crime rate, the largest 
percentage of our people behind bars, cities where young people in gangs 
are often better armed than the police forces who are supposed to 
protect the rest of the citizens. We can do better than this, and this 
crime bill is a very good start. Ask Congress simply to give you the 
tools you need to do your job.
    The 100,000 new police officers is a 5-year goal. But I have made it 
clear to Congress that if they will go ahead and pass this bill now, 
even though it's mid-April, I will cut through the bureaucracy and the 
redtape to make sure that 20,000 of those new officers are hired, 
trained, and ready to go to work within the first year of this bill.
    More police officers on the street, in the neighborhoods, relating 
to the people who live there, properly trained and properly deployed, 
will lower the crime rate. In Los Angeles--he was too modest to mention 
this, but after the earthquake, Mayor Riordan and Chief Williams 
responded to a potentially explosive situation by increasing police 
presence on the street, increasing contact with the community. And there 
was

[[Page 696]]

instead of an increase in the crime rate, which was perfectly 
predictable, a dramatic decrease in the crime rate. The Los Angeles 
Times said it helped keep criminals off the street in record numbers. 
The people of L.A. rose to the occasion because they saw the police in 
their communities, they knew they were not alone, and they knew it was a 
problem that, together, they could deal with.
    No matter how many more police we put into our communities, we also 
know that we have to do something about the relatively small percentage 
of our criminal population who commit the dangerous, violent crimes 
repeatedly. This crime bill does tell them, ``Three strikes and you're 
out.'' As I have said several times and I said with the Attorney General 
over at the Justice Department a couple of days ago, this is a 
controversial provision of the bill. But let us not forget that for many 
violent criminals today, if the consequences of their crime are serious 
enough, they could get a life sentence: ``One strike and you're out.''
    But State rules are different from State to State on parole 
eligibility. And there are many people that we now know are highly 
likely to continue to repeat certain kinds of very serious crimes. There 
ought to be a provision in our criminal law that identifies them and 
that protects the rest of the population and the law enforcement 
population and permits us to say to other criminals who are not in that 
category, ``You have a chance to start your life again.'' So, is it 
right to have a ``three strikes and you're out'' law? I believe it is. 
And I think that we're doing the right thing to pass it in this bill 
today.
    We also make available funding for 30,000 more prison cells so that 
we don't treat this as some sort of mandate on the States. We are trying 
to help the States to enact their own kinds of sensible punishment laws 
and bear some of the costs along with them. We also provide funding for 
smarter and less costly punishment for nonviolent criminals--boot camps 
for juvenile offenders--and significant, even dramatic, increases in 
drug treatment so that people who are going to be paroled have a good 
chance to make it once they go back on the street. I thank you, Sergeant 
Lawson, for mentioning Lee Brown, the Director of our drug policy. Now 
he worries not only about community policing but about how we can make 
sure, when we do parole people, they're likely to be law-abiding. And I 
can tell you, it does not make sense, when you look at the percentage of 
people who commit crimes who have a drug or an alcohol abuse problem, it 
does not make any sense to put them back on the street without adequate 
drug treatment. Finally, this bill does something about that. And the 
Congress should be urged to pass it for that reason alone, along with 
the other good things in the bill.
    Let me say finally, this bill has a healthy dose of prevention. And 
we know that works. And I was glad to see Sergeant Lawson speak up for 
prevention. It's funny, you know, you hear sometimes the debates in the 
Congress and people who want to be tough on crime say, ``Well, this 
prevention stuff, it's a little squishy, and maybe we shouldn't spend 
the money on it.'' But if you talk to any veteran police officer, they 
tell you, ``Spend the money on prevention. Give me the tools to do 
alcohol and drug abuse education. Give me the tools to give these kids 
something to do before school and after school and at night. Give me the 
tools to give these young people something to say yes to, instead of 
just having us tell them to say no to something wrong.'' That's what the 
law enforcement community tells us. So I would ask you as you go to the 
Hill today, if you believe that, as every law enforcement official I've 
ever spoken with does, tell the Congress that prevention is an important 
part of this.
    On Monday at the Justice Department, a young man from Boston named 
Eddie Cutanda stood up and said he used to hate the police. Pretty brave 
kid. There were about 500 police officers there when he said it. 
[Laughter] And he said he used to hate the police, because he used to 
run the streets with his friends. But he got away from gangs and drugs, 
thanks to a community policing program and the kind of afterschool 
activity that the officers were able to bring to the young people of 
Boston, a prevention program that worked, that made this young man and 
his friends go from hating the police to loving the police and had him 
standing up in the Justice Department with the Attorney General and the 
President of the United States, saying, ``We are not part of a lost 
generation. We want to have a life and a better future.'' There are all 
kinds of prevention strategies in this bill including the opportunity 
for some of our communities to offer large numbers of jobs to teenagers 
who are today out of work, just to test to see whether that will lower 
the crime rate dramatically. We will be able to experiment

[[Page 697]]

with a lot of different things, as well as building on what works in 
community after community.
    You know, I ran for this job and moved to Washington because I 
wanted to help empower people back home all over America to solve their 
own problems. That's what this crime bill does. And another thing I am 
proud of is we do it without new taxes, even though, as Mayor James 
said, it is by far the biggest Federal investment, and Mayor Abramson 
emphasized, by far the biggest Federal investment in anticrime 
activities in the history of this country.
    We do it by taking a major portion of the Vice President's 
reinventing Government plan, a plan to reduce the Federal bureaucracy by 
250,000 employees over the next 5 years and put all the savings into a 
trust fund directed to fund the crime bill. That's a pretty good swap: 
reduce the Federal Government by 250,000 by attrition, by early 
retirement, with discipline over the next 5 years, and give all the 
money from the savings back to local communities to make our streets, 
our homes, and our schools safer.
    Again, let me thank you all for coming here. Let me remind you that 
this is not a partisan issue or a sectional issue or a racial issue or 
an income issue. If anything should unite our country, if anything 
should truly make us a United States of America in 1994, it should be 
the passionate desire to restore real freedom to our streets, to give 
our families back their security, to give our children back their 
future.
    I thank all of you for what you have done to secure it. I look 
forward now to honoring these fine police men and women behind me, and I 
urge you: take this opportunity to make it abundantly clear to the 
United States Congress that America should not wait another day, another 
week, for a crime bill that will achieve these objectives. We need it, 
and you can deliver it.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 11:35 a.m. on the South Lawn at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Willie L. Williams, chief of 
police, Los Angeles, CA.