    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
    [September 19, 1995]
    [Pages 1379-1382]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Community in Jacksonville, Florida
    September 19, 1995

        Thank you so much. Wow! Sheriff Glover, I don't ever want to be on
    the ballot against you. I'm glad to be here.
        Thank you, Congresswoman Corrine Brown, for your friendship and your
    support, and thank you for your support of the crime bill, which has
    made our streets safer and made the children's future here more secure.
    Thank you, Governor Chiles, for being my friend and adviser and for your
    leadership. And thank you, Lieutenant Governor MacKay, for your long
    support and your leadership here. Mayor Delaney, we are delighted to be
    here in this great and growing community. I want to thank you and the
    State's attorney, Harry Shorstein, and all the other local officials
    here.
        And I want to say, as President, it's a particular honor for me to
    be here in Jacksonville not only because this is a vibrant, growing city
    that did get a professional football team--[applause]. Don't be
    discouraged by the rough starts. I've had a lot of rough starts in my
    life. The opera is not over.
        I want to also say a special word of thanks to the people of
    Jacksonville for the remarkable contribution that has been made by this
    community over so many years to the national defense of the United
    States. We are grateful for that, and we continue to be grateful for
    that.
        I want to say a special word of appreciation, too, to Florida's own,
    our Attorney General, Janet Reno, for the wonderful job that she has
    done as the Attorney General of the United States. And the Director of
    our COPS program, who is also here on my far left, Joe Brann, from
    California, who has come to Washington as a chief of police to work with
    us to get these police officers out in the United States. I thank them
    for being here, and I thank them for their leadership.
        I want to thank all the schools that are represented here. I have a
    list. I may miss some, but I think we're joined by Kite Elementary
    School, Lake Forest Elementary, Moncrease Elementary, Ribalt Middle
    School, Raines and Ribalt High School, and the Edward Waters College
    choir, thank you.
        I'd also like to thank one more person, Police Officer Larisa
    Crenshaw, who walked down the street with me today, because she and
    these other officers in uniform behind me, they're what we're here to
    talk about. I thank her, and I thank these people for being willing to
    serve your community in law enforcement.
        You know, when I ran for President in 1992, I had a vision of what I
    wanted America to look like as we enter the 21st century. I want this to
    be a high-opportunity country for all Americans, where entrepreneurs can
    flourish, where people who work hard can be in the middle class, where
    we shrink the under class and give everybody who is willing to do what

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    it takes to make the most of their own lives a chance to do it. I wanted
    us to have strong families and strong communities with good education
    systems, good health care, a clean environment. But I knew that in order
    to do that we first had to tackle the problems of crime and drugs.
    Without safe streets, safe schools, and safe homes, America will never
    be what it ought to be.
        We've worked hard for the last 2\1/2\ years to bring the deficit
    down, to invest more in education, to deal with all of these issues I
    talked about. And we've got more jobs and less crime in America than we
    had 2\1/2\ years ago. And I think that's pretty good evidence that our
    strategy is working to move this country forward.
        On the issue of crime, I was astonished when I got to Washington,
    having been a Governor for 12 years--if there was one issue that had
    nothing to do with partisan politics all my life, it was crime. I never
    met a Republican or a Democrat that wanted to be a victim of crime. I
    couldn't imagine that there would ever be any partisan issue there. When
    I was a Governor, when I was attorney general, we all worked together on
    issues affecting public safety. And I can see that's what you do here in
    Jacksonville. When I got to Washington, I discovered that even though
    the violent crime rate had tripled from the 1960's to the 1990's, they
    had been fighting partisan battles over the crime bill for 6 long
    years--hot air in Washington, more crime on the streets.
        In 1994, we ended the hot air and the partisan bickering and passed
    the crime bill, and crime is going down on the streets of America. The
    crime bill featured more police, helped the States to build more
    prisons, stronger punishment for people who deserve it but also more
    prevention to give our young people something to say yes to as well as
    something to say no to, the chance to avoid getting into trouble in the
    first place.
        We made ``three strikes and you're out'' the law of the land. What
    that means is that people who are serious career criminals now will go
    to jail for the rest of their careers so they can't get out and continue
    to do violence and to victimize people. We banned deadly assault weapons
    from our streets and from our schools, while protecting hundreds of
    sporting weapons for law-abiding hunters and sports men and women in
    this country. It was a good balance and the right one to strike.
        We created an office to combat the problems of violence against
    women, in the home and on the street, a special problem in the United
    States and one the First Lady talked about when she went to China and
    represented us so well there just a few days ago.
        The most important thing we did was to give the communities of this
    country the ability to hire 100,000 police officers to do what these 31
    police officers behind me are going to do, to walk up and down the
    streets of America, like Marvin Street, to talk to neighbors, to talk to
    people, to get them involved in keeping their communities safe and free
    of crime.
        We give the communities the resources they need to put the police
    officers on the street, and people like Sheriff Glover all over America
    take responsibility to train and deploy those officers. Then the
    officers help ordinary citizens, like the folks I just visited with,
    walking up and down the street, to find the commitment to do their part
    in fighting against crime.
        If we're going to make our streets safe, if we're going to do what
    we have to do to give our children a chance at a future, we have got to
    have the help of grassroots citizens who are willing to work with police
    officers. If we can get them on the streets, you've got to help them do
    their jobs. In the 6 months since community police officers started
    patrolling this neighborhood, in 6 months, violent and property crimes
    have dropped by more than 8 percent in just 6 months. And they're just
    beginning.
        What I want you to know is that, just like Sheriff Glover said that
    Jacksonville could do anything, America can do this. We do not have to
    put up with the high rates of crime we have. We do not have to put up
    with the high rates of drug abuse among our children we have. We can do
    something about it. You have evidence on this street, in this
    neighborhood. We can do something about it.
        All over America today, the crime rate is down, the murder rate is
    down. We see people making progress to take control of their own lives,
    their families, their neighborhoods, their schools, and get this country
    going in the right direction.
        But let me tell you, there are also troubling signs on the horizon.
    And I'll just give you two. While drug use is down among people between
    the ages of 18 and 34, casual drug use, marijuana, among teenagers is
    going back up again. While the crime rate is down all over America

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    and the murder rate is down, violent crime among teenagers is going up
    again.
        The Justice Department issued a report the other day which showed
    that while the overall crime rate is down, violent crime among juveniles
    is going up, and a majority of members of gangs say that they think they
    are justified in shooting someone who treats them with disrespect. We
    actually had a case in another city not very long ago where a 16-year-
    old boy shot a 12-year-old boy who was sort of the neighborhood comic.
    And he thought the 12-year-old boy was treating him with disrespect.
        Whatever happened to ``Count to 10 before you do something you might
    later regret''? Whatever happened to kids being taught that sticks and
    stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you? Whatever
    happened to people defining self-respect based on what they believe
    about themselves, not what somebody else says about them? Shoot, if the
    President followed that rule, he wouldn't have any respect. [Laughter]
        You think about it. It's a big problem. Look at what happened in Los
    Angeles over the weekend. A family took one wrong turn and because they
    were in the wrong place, gang members felt they had the right to shoot
    at them and take their lives, kill an innocent child.
        So what I want to tell you is, this is a moment of great hope. We
    know we can lower the crime rate. We know we can lower the murder rate.
    We know we can reduce drug abuse and drug dealing in our neighborhood.
    We know we can take our streets back. We know how to do it. Your sheriff
    has proved that he can do it, working with you, if you will help him. We
    know how to do this. This is one of the most important things that has
    happened to America in the last 20 years. We don't believe we are
    helpless in the face of crime anymore. We know we can turn it around.
    But we also know that the job is not yet done.
        Therefore, to go back to what the Congresswoman said at the
    beginning, we fought through one partisan political battle to get this
    crime bill. I heard people say on the floor of Congress that the crime
    bill was a fraud, that it wouldn't help to lower the crime rate, that we
    would never get 20,000 police on the street in 6 years, and we were
    promising 100,000 in 6 years. Well, in one year, we're over 25,000, and
    we're going to make it on time, ahead of the budget, ahead of the
    schedule.
        And we now have a consensus among the American people. I believe
    that we ought to keep on lowering the crime rate. I don't believe--I
    haven't heard the first person write me a letter and say, ``Dear Mr.
    President, I don't like the fact that the crime rate is going down.
    Please stop what you're doing.'' [Laughter] I haven't gotten one letter
    saying that.
        Now, in Washington the Congress is trying to balance the budget. I
    support that. We ought to balance the budget. We never had a permanent
    deficit until the 12 years before I became President. We have taken the
    deficit from $290 billion a year when I took office to $160 billion this
    year, more than 40 percent reduction. And I want to finish the job.
        We can balance the budget, and we should. But what I want to tell
    you is, we do not have to destroy our commitment to the education of our
    young people, to the training of unemployed people, to the economic
    future of America. We do not have to have dramatic increases in the
    health care costs of elderly people when 75 percent of them are living
    on less than $24,000 a year. We do not have to sacrifice the
    environmental and public health and safety protections that give us
    clean air, clean water, and safe food. We do not have to do any of this
    to balance the budget.
        I have given the Congress a balanced budget plan which does not do
    any of these things. And we certainly, we certainly do not have to come
    off of our commitment to put 100,000 police officers on the street and
    have more and more stories like the ones I heard walking up and down
    Marvin Street today. We owe it to America to balance the budget and to
    reduce the crime rate until Americans are safe in their streets, safe in
    their homes, safe in their schools.
        So I ask you, because you are fortunate enough to live in this
    growing and vibrant community, because you are fortunate enough to have
    elected leaders that work together across party lines and know that
    crime is an American problem and a human problem, because you are
    fortunate enough to have a sheriff who has proved to you that community
    policing works, because you are fortunate enough to have experienced a
    drop in the crime rate, I ask you to join with me and say to the United
    States Congress, this is not about partisan politics. We are lowering
    the crime rate in America. If we have more jobs and lower crime, America
    is

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    going to be a better place. So let's continue to do that. Let's continue
    to do that.
        And let us say: Balance the budget, yes. But do it and still send us
    our police officers, because we want our children to have a healthy,
    safe, strong, drug-free, crime-free, violence-free future. And now we
    know we can do it. Let's don't stop. Let's keep on until the job's done.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:47 a.m. at the Carvill Park Community
    Center. In his remarks, he referred to Sheriff Nathaniel Glover of Duval
    County; Gov. Lawton Chiles and Lt. Gov. Buddy MacKay of Florida; Mayor
    John A. Delaney of Jacksonville; and Joseph Brann, Director, Community
    Oriented Policing Services (COPS), Department of Justice.