[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
[August 1, 1995]
[Pages 1189-1191]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Teleconference Remarks to the Fraternal Order of Police
August 1, 1995

    Thank you very much, Dewey. I'm going to miss those introductions. I 
want to thank you for your 8 years of strong leadership as the national 
president of the Fraternal Order of Police. It gives me great pleasure 
to present you a Presidential commendation for your distinguished 
service to the Nation, which I believe the Attorney General will 
personally deliver to you tomorrow.
    I also want to thank the other departing board members for all the 
hard work that you have done to help us strengthen law enforcement 
around the country. I understand that the elections to succeed all of 
you folks are on Thursday, so let me say as a fellow candidate, I want 
to wish the other candidates the best of luck and offer every one of 
them my heartfelt sympathy. I know how tough the last couple of days 
before an election can be; I've been there.
    Your new president will lead the FOP into a better, safer world for 
law enforcement; a better, safer world because of the hard work of 
people like Dewey Stokes; a better, safer world because of the 
partnership our administration has been privileged to forge with you and 
with men and women in law enforcement all across our great country.
    In the years before I came to Washington, it was clear that those of 
you who put your lives on the line to protect the rest of us were simply 
not getting the tools you needed to get the job done. The facts spoke 
for themselves. Crime was going up, but the number of police was staying 
the same or falling in so many cities and rural areas. It was a 
dangerous ratio.
    I also had a lot of personal experience as a guide. As attorney 
general and then as a Governor, I went to too many funerals for police 
officers who were friends of mine killed in the line of duty. When I 
became President, I knew we all had to do more. So I came to Washington 
with a clear agenda: more police, guns out of the hands of criminals, an 
emphasis on community policing and other strategies to build stronger 
neighborhoods and to stop crimes before they happen. Working together, 
we have turned that agenda into law.
    You and I and others who are on our side broke 6 years of gridlock 
and passed a crime bill that was written with the help of police 
officers all across America. We knew we needed more police officers, so 
we're putting 100,000 more police on the street. Already we've boosted 
your ranks by awarding more than 20,000 new police officers to over half 
the departments in the United States. We knew we had to get deadly 
assault weapons out of our lives, so we banned 19 types of assault 
weapons, weapons that target police officers and children. At the same 
time, we protected about 650 hunting and sporting weapons specifically.
    We knew too many criminals were getting too many chances to do harm, 
so now we have ``three strikes and you're out,'' and it's being enforced 
around the country. We knew there had to be zero tolerance for killing a 
law enforcement officer, so now in Federal law, we have the death 
penalty for anyone who murders a police officer. We also passed the 
Brady bill, which languished in Congress for 7 years. Last year alone, 
this commonsense law prevented more than 40,000 felons and fugitives 
from purchasing handguns.

[[Page 1190]]

    And in June, I announced my support of legislation to ban armor-
piercing bullets. Our current laws control ammunition based on what it's 
made of, and that's not good enough. Too many lethal bullets still slip 
through the cracks. This legislation will change that. It will see to it 
that we judge ammunition not on the basis of what's in it but on the 
harm it can do. If it can rip through a bulletproof vest like a knife 
through butter, then it should be history, no matter what it's made of.
    These measures are helping you bring safety and security back to the 
lives of millions of Americans and helping you to be somewhat safer 
while you're doing that very difficult job.
    And you have made a phenomenal amount of progress. Crime is down in 
major cities all around the country. Last Sunday, the New York Times 
reported that the dramatic drop in crime in New York City is a direct 
result of sensible gun laws, increased police presence, and a focus on 
hot spots, on the areas with high crime rates. A study the Justice 
Department sponsored in Kansas City yielded similar results: target an 
area, get rid of the guns, intimidate the criminals, the crime goes 
down. We are making progress.
    But you and I both know we've got a lot more to do, because even as 
the overall crime rates drop, the rate of random violence among young 
people is still going up--dramatically in many places. As a parent, I am 
sick and tired of seeing stories like the one I read recently about a 
16-year-old boy who shot a 12-year-old boy dead because he thought he'd 
been treated with disrespect by the younger boy. This story came just 
days after a national survey in which an unbelievable two-thirds of 
young gang members said they thought it was actually acceptable to shoot 
someone if they treated you with disrespect.
    As long as there are stories like this, as long as young people are 
more likely to be both the victims and the perpetrators of crime, as 
long as casual drug use among our children is rising even as overall 
hard drug use goes down, as long as there are children who have never 
been taught the difference between right and wrong, we'll all have more 
work to do.
    And that's why I'm troubled by so much of what's going on here in 
Washington. We have to balance the budget, all right, but there are some 
in Congress who would do it by tipping the balance against law 
enforcement. They would replace our efforts to put 100,000 new police 
officers on the street with a block grant that doesn't require a single 
new officer to be hired. They want to cut 23 million students out of our 
safe and drug-free schools initiative--out of the programs that so many 
of you bring to our schools every day all across America. And literally, 
they want to shut down the National Office of Drug Control Policy.
    We can't give up on the war on drugs. And we can't back off of our 
support for law enforcement. And the truth is, we don't need to 
sacrifice these national priorities to balance the budget. We can 
continue to implement the crime bill and balance the budget. The only 
thing we'd have to do is to give up on an unnecessarily huge tax cut and 
to take a little longer to balance the budget. Now that luxury seems a 
small price to pay for necessities like balancing the budget and 
strengthening law enforcement at the same time.
    And believe it or not, there are still some in Congress who want to 
repeal the Brady bill and lift the ban on assault weapons. Let me be 
clear: These attempts to roll back the clock are misguided. We cannot 
turn back in the fight against crime. There are still too many streets 
in America where our children are afraid to stand at a bus stop, too 
many neighborhoods where our seniors are fearful of going to the grocery 
store, too many communities where families are scared to head outside 
for a walk on a warm summer evening.
    So those in Congress who would attempt to repeal the Brady bill or 
the assault weapons ban or our pledge to put 100,000 new police officers 
on the street, let me say one more time: You're going nowhere fast. If 
you do succumb to the political pressure from extremist groups to repeal 
any of these measures, I will veto them in a heartbeat.
    On these issues I have a simple pledge. I won't let any bill pass my 
desk that hurts you or the people you protect. That's a good American 
standard. We all ought to judge our conduct by it.
    You know, this has been a difficult period for law enforcement. You 
seem to be under assault from many fronts. Like people from every walk 
of life, police officers sometimes do make mistakes and have to deal 
with the consequences. But unlike other citizens, you also put your 
lives on the line for the rest of us every day. I'm reminded of a T-
shirt that people

[[Page 1191]]

in Oklahoma City made after the terrible bombing there. It read, ``A 
society that makes war against its police had better learn to make 
friends with criminals.'' That's the fact.
    I'm sorry I can't be with you in person today, but I want you to 
have no doubt I am still standing shoulder to shoulder with you in the 
battle against crime and violence. It threatens us all every day, every 
night, and you're trying to do something about it. As long as you are, 
I'll be with you for as long as I'm here.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 12:45 p.m. by satellite from Room 459 of 
the Old Executive Office Building to the FOP conference in Virginia 
Beach, VA.