    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [February 3, 1996]
    [Pages 151-155]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Community in Manchester, New Hampshire
    February 3, 1996

        Thank you very much. Hello. Thank you very much, Sergeant Robidas,
    for your introduction and for your fine work. Thank you, Nancy Tessier,
    for your work at the Beech Street School and for your support of
    community policing. Chief Favreau; to the Concord police chief, Dave
    Walchak, who is a great honor for New Hampshire, he's the president of
    the International Association of Police Chiefs, and we're glad to have
    you here.
        I want to thank the others who have been with me today: your United
    States Attorney, Paul Gagnon; your U.S. Marshal, Ray Gagnon; the
    Hillsborough County attorney, Peter McDonough. And I thank Father Adrian
    Longchamps, who met with me today. I want to thank the police officers
    in particular who visited with me just a moment ago at the community
    station, Tyrone Guyse and Nick Willard. And I want to say to Mr. Byron,
    the police officer who is standing here to my right--right before I came
    up here he said, ``Mr. President, this is the best job I ever had. I
    love doing this work.''
        I want to thank two others who are in our group today: Pauline Coat,
    the executive director of the Manchester Neighborhood Services, and in
    some ways the linchpin of this whole experiment, Alice Septin, who is
    the head of the Take Back Our Neighborhood Corporation. Let's give her a
    big hand. [Applause] Thank you, Alice.
        I thank all the community police officers who are here, all those
    who participated in Operation Street Sweeper. I thank the D.A.R.E.
    students and the people in the D.A.R.E. program who are here. Let's give
    them a big hand. [Applause] And I thank the AmeriCorps members who are

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    here from Salem, for their work and their progress. Thank you very much.
        It is wonderful to be back in New Hampshire, great to be back in
    Manchester, and great to be talking about an issue that I discussed a
    great deal with the people of New Hampshire back in 1992 which is now a
    reality on the streets of Manchester and throughout the United States.
        Let me begin by saying that, as all of you know, in my State of the
    Union Address I tried to outline for our country what I believe the
    challenges are that we face today and those that we will face in the
    years ahead, and what I think we all have to do to meet those challenges
    and how I see the Nation's Government's role in working with the
    American people to meet them. This is an age of great possibility. There
    are more good things available to more people here than ever before. But
    it is also an age of very stiff challenge. More and more people have to
    work harder just to keep up in this new economy. We still have too much
    crime and violence. We still have a lot of other problems.
        So the great challenge for us is how to expand opportunity to more
    Americans, how to bring this country together around our core values,
    how to maintain our country's leadership for freedom and for peace. The
    first thing we have to do is to finish the work of yesterday. That means
    we have to pass the right kind of balanced budget plan that eliminates
    the deficit but also protects our obligations to our parents, to our
    children, and to our future through our investments in the programs of
    Medicare, Medicaid, environmental protection, and educational
    opportunities. And let me emphasize again, with all the work that I have
    done with the Republican congressional leaders and the Democratic
    congressional leaders there are now more than enough savings that are
    common to both our plans to pass that kind of balanced budget plan, and
    I hope we will do it and do it soon.
        After we do that we will still be left with the challenges we face.
    And I have identified seven that I think are the greatest challenges for
    our country, of which taking back our streets and making America safe is
    one and, in some cases, the most fundamental. We have to do more to
    strengthen our families. We have to do more to provide educational
    opportunity for all. We have to do more to provide economic security to
    people who are working hard but aren't getting raises and don't have
    access to health care and stable pensions and lifetime education and
    training opportunities. We have to do more to clean our environment and
    protect it and to grow the economy while cleaning up the environment
    instead of destroying it. We have to do more to fight the problems we
    face to our security--terrorism, weapons of mass destruction--working in
    concert with others for peace. We have to change the way the Government
    works to increase your sense of confidence in it.
        When I ran here in 1994, I identified four things I thought ought to
    be done to reform the way the Government works. The Congress has done
    two of those things this year, and I applaud them. They passed a very
    tough reform bill on lobbying to limit what Congress can take from
    lobbyists and to require lobbyists to disclose how much money they spend
    and on what. That was a good thing. They passed a bill to require
    Congress to live under the laws that are imposed on the private sector.
    That was a good thing. I believe your former Congressman was one of the
    original sponsors of that legislation, Dick Swett. That was a good
    thing.
        Now, there are two other things we need to do this year. We need to
    pass the line item veto that they have pledged to pass for me, and we
    need to pass meaningful campaign finance reform. It is very important.
    It can be done. It ought to be done.
        But there's one other thing I want to say. A great part of this
    debate in Washington is about what the National Government's
    responsibility is. And the way you've heard this debate over the last 15
    years has often been big Government is getting in the way of the
    American economy; big Government is undermining the independence of the
    American community; big Government is weakening, not strengthening, the
    American family.
        I have to tell you that I think that is the wrong debate. The era of
    big Government is over. Our administration has eliminated 16,000 pages
    of Federal regulations, hundreds of programs, thousands of unnecessary
    offices. The Government is over 200,000 people smaller today than it was
    the day I took the oath of office as President.
        But the issue is not big Government versus small Government. The
    issue is what is your responsibility through the National Government

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    to work to help people make the most of their own lives, to work to help
    communities solve their own problems and meet their own challenges. That
    is the issue.
        And if you look at the challenge we have to take our streets back,
    to make them safe again, I am very gratified at what we are doing, but
    we've got a long way to go. I'm gratified that the crime rate is down
    here. I am gratified that the crime rate is down all over America. I
    think it's wonderful that New York City had the biggest drop in crime
    since 1972. I think it is wonderful that Houston has the lowest murder
    rate it's had in 19 years. I think these are good things.
        But we all know that our job will not be over until crime and
    violence are the exception, not the rule, until every neighborhood can
    say what I heard the people in this neighborhood say to me a few moments
    ago: that people now can walk outside and walk down the street and they
    don't have to be afraid; that the police are there at the play yard
    talking to the kids, and they know them by name; that people feel
    secure.
        You can't eliminate the darkness that lurks in human nature. There
    will never be a time when there is absolutely no crime in America, when
    there is absolutely no violence. But we can go back to the days when
    it's the exception, not the rule, and people have their freedom on the
    streets of this country.
        Now, my philosophy has been all along that if we could identify a
    national challenge and an idea that works, it was a legitimate thing for
    the Government in Washington--your Government--to define the ``what'',
    what is the challenge; and then to help people to meet that challenge.
    But the people at the grassroots level should define how to do it; that
    people in Washington should not be telling people how to do it. That's
    what we do here. In our education reforms we said, okay, here are some
    national standards we ought to meet; you figure out how to do it. In
    welfare reform we said we want to move people from welfare to work, we
    want people to be better parents and effective workers and break the
    cycle of dependence, but any State that's got a better idea about how to
    do it, we ought to give you permission to try.
        We did it in health care. We said if you can find a way to slow
    health care costs and expand health coverage to people who are working
    through the Medicaid program, we'll give you a chance to determine how
    to do that. And we've given more permission to more State and local
    governments to do more things in the last 3 years than the previous
    administrations did in 12 years before me. I believe in giving States
    and localities and private citizens the right to determine the ``how.''
        But the ``what'' in the case of crime is a national problem. Crime
    and violence is a national problem, and we know that community policing,
    which you celebrate here in Manchester, is what is working everywhere.
    Just a couple of weeks ago one of our major national news magazines had
    a cover story on turning the corner in the war against crime. And the
    police commissioner from New York City was featured on the cover as a
    stand-in for all the police officers everywhere and their community
    supporters who are working to make projects like this work.
        Consider what has happened. The streets of New Hampshire are safer
    today because under the crime bill that we passed providing for
    community policing, there are 132 new police officers in communities all
    across this State. But they aren't just there as police officers,
    they're also changing what they're doing. They are working with
    community groups, like the community groups in this neighborhood. They
    are working not just to catch more criminals but to prevent crime from
    occurring in the first place and to make streets inhospitable places for
    the return of crime and drugs and gangs and violence. And it is working.
    We need to do more of it.
        I heard the story of a 9-year-old girl who told an officer working
    in one of your community substations that her mother now allows her to
    play outside because the police had made it safe. Isn't that the story
    you want every child in America to be able to tell? Shouldn't every
    child in America be able to tell that story?
        I was very moved by the grit and the determination of the people
    that I saw in the community substation today and by their sense that
    they could make a difference. One of the things that I constantly battle
    as your President is the feeling too many Americans have that their
    efforts won't make a difference anymore. Too many people seem to believe
    that we can't do better. And if one message comes out of this trip I
    took to Manchester this morning, should go out all over America is, when
    it comes to crime and violence we can do better. You have

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    done better in Manchester. People are doing better all over this
    country.
        We can take our streets and our neighborhoods back, but it will
    require a partnership between people in law enforcement, community
    leaders, and grassroots citizens. We have to do it together. No one can
    do it alone, but together we can all do it. And that is the central
    lesson the United States has to face today.
        I want to be absolutely frank in saying that while I think it would
    be a disastrous mistake for the Congress to reverse course on the crime
    bill and not to continue until we have put the full complement of
    100,000 police officers on our streets--in just a little over a year and
    a half we're already a third of the way home--Congress must not turn
    around. I want to be frank in saying to you that we could put all these
    police officers out in departments all across America, and if we didn't
    have community leaders who were prepared to take their streets and
    neighborhoods back, if we didn't have schools that were prepared to
    support the police, if we didn't have parents like those that help this
    substation here get decorated for Christmas and support them, we could
    put the police officers out there and we still wouldn't succeed.
        It requires both a commitment to putting the police back on the
    street and in the neighborhoods and a commitment from citizens to win
    the war against crime. Every American should be challenged to join a
    neighborhood watch group; if you see somebody in trouble, to pick up a
    phone and call for help; to spend a few hours every week helping out
    young people who need a helping hand from a caring adult through a Boys
    Club, a Girls Club, a D.A.R.E. program, or some other constructive way
    to get our kids off to a good start in life.
        Neighbors helping neighbors, friends sticking up for friends,
    parents teaching children the difference between right and wrong,
    establishing bonds of trust between police officers and people in the
    communities, all these things must also be done. But the good news is it
    can make a difference. And what we celebrate today, I believe, is a
    model of the kind of partnerships we need in America.
        You have a President and a National Government that says, here is
    the problem: There is too much crime and violence. We know something
    that works everywhere it's been tried and done right, community-based
    policing. So we will pass a bill to provide incentives to help
    communities hire these police officers. But they must decide--we said
    the ``what''; they have to decide the ``how.'' We make no judgments
    about who gets hired, about how they get trained, about how they're
    deployed, and we can't begin to say whether or not there is a community
    group supporting or working with them.
        So it never works unless you supply the ``how.'' You fill in all the
    blanks. You take your communities back. You make the most of the
    potential. You give your children a chance to live up to their God-given
    abilities. That is the model America must adopt for dealing with all the
    great challenges we face today: partnership, working together. There is
    no more issue of big Government. But I am telling you, we cannot afford
    to say we're going to go back to the time when everybody just fends for
    themselves. The only way we're going to solve the problems we've got
    today is to work together, where everybody plays their role. We do it,
    and we make a difference.
        And let me just say, a critical component of this is building some
    trust again between law enforcement officers and people in the
    community. One of the most painful experiences I've had as President was
    the loss of trust I felt in a lot of places like New Hampshire and my
    home State of Arkansas, when the law enforcement officers came to us and
    they said, ``If you want us to do the job you have got to pass the Brady
    bill and you've got to give us the ability to get these assault weapons
    off the street where people can't be sprayed innocently while they're
    walking up and down the block.'' We've got to do it.
        But then when we tried to do that we found that in a lot of States,
    like New Hampshire and Arkansas, where half the people have a hunting or
    a fishing license or both, there were a lot of people who said, ``Well,
    this is going to take away my gun. This is going to be a terrible thing.
    This is going to erode the right to keep and bear arms. This is going to
    undermine our hunting culture.'' And frankly, it's hard, with as much
    distrust of Government as there was out there, to break through that.
    But now, I've been here in New Hampshire, this is my second day, and
    I've heard all of these fellas bragging on the deer season we just had,
    and not a single person lost their deer rifle. But we've got 44,000
    people with criminal

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    records who did not get handguns last year because of the Brady bill.
        So we are trying to help our police officers be safer and keep these
    assault weapons out of the hands of gang members, but no one has lost a
    weapon--a sporting weapon, a hunting weapon. And maybe now that time has
    passed, we can rebuild the bonds of trust there, too, because the
    overwhelming majority of sportsmen in this country--sports men and
    women--are honest, good, law-abiding people, and we need everybody
    working together to whip this problem of crime and violence.
        And now--I saw it today and I heard all of you talking about the
    bonds of trust increasing in this community; that's what we need more of
    in America. You know, most people are good people. Most people get up
    every day and do the best they can to do the right things. And we all
    look at each other sometimes with too much distrust. Again I say if we
    can overcome that, we can solve any problem.
        But I hope all Americans will look to Manchester, and we'll look to
    other communities where the crime rate is going down. And I hope they
    will say, ``Number one, we don't have to put up with this anymore. We
    don't have to put up with streets where our kids can't walk safely. We
    don't have to put up with neighborhoods where good, decent people don't
    want to live anymore. We don't have to move away to feel safe in our own
    homes. There is another way and a better way. But, secondly, that better
    way requires both more police officers in my community and my
    neighborhood walking my streets, and my personal involvement and my
    trust, and our sense of partnership and community.''
        If we have that, we can not only take our streets back and make our
    country safe, we can deal with any other challenge the American people
    face. If you look at our whole history, there has never been a single,
    solitary time when America failed when America worked together. And
    that's what we have to do today.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:20 p.m. at St. Cecilia's social hall. In
    his remarks, he referred to Sgt. Ronald (Red) Robidas, community
    policing commander; Nancy Tessier, principal, Beech Street School; and
    Peter Favreau, Manchester police chief.