    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
    [July 22, 1996]
    [Pages 1175-1179]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks in Monrovia, California
    July 22, 1996

        Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much. I have had a
    wonderful time, and I wish I could just quit now--[laughter]--because
    all the people who have spoken have said what I came to highlight for
    America. I thank Nora Graham for leading the Pledge of Allegiance; your
    principal, Lois Wurmbrand; and your superintendent, Louise Taylor; Chief
    Santoro, thank you. Yolanda Gallardo, you're a good speaker; you ought
    to run for office some time. [Applause] Thank you. I thank Lieutenant
    Governor Gray Davis and the L.A. district attorney, Gil Garcetti, for
    being here with me, and the other law enforcement officials, Chief
    Williams and other chiefs from around the area and law enforcement
    officers and the State Assembly members and the others who have come
    here. And Mr. Mayor, I want to say a special word of thanks to you and
    the City Council of Monrovia for making us feel so welcome, and thank
    you for bringing your mother today; that was a good thing to do. Thank
    you very much.
        I want you to know why I wanted to come to this community today. I
    spend an enormous amount of time as President trying to make our country
    ready to move into the 21st century. That's why I ran for the job. I had
    this simple but rather dramatic vision that we were drifting divided
    into the next century when we ought to be charging united into the next
    century and that we really ought to be, in 4 years as we begin this new
    century and this millennium, a country, first, where the American dream
    is alive for everybody who is willing to work for it; second, where we
    have a sense of national community rooted in mutual respect for each
    other across all the incredible diversity that makes up America; and
    finally, that we continue to be the strongest force in the world for
    peace and freedom and security and prosperity.
        And if that happens I believe that our children will live in the
    greatest age of possibility in human history. The children that are in
    this school system now, 10 years from now they'll be doing jobs that
    haven't even been invented yet. And if we do our jobs they'll be doing
    that in a peaceful world that has people who are more united, stronger
    families and neighborhoods and communities, States in our Nation. And
    we'll be working with other countries around the world to fight our
    common enemies of this new age, including terrorism and drug running and
    the proliferation of dangerous weapons and the wars based on racial and
    ethnic and religious hatred.
        I believe that the stakes could hardly be higher. But meeting them
    begins at home. And that's why I wanted to come here. There are things
    that we have to do in Washington. We have to provide for the national
    defense and to meet the security challenges of the new era. We have to
    try to create a framework within which the American people can grow
    their own economy. Otherwise, a lot of what we do is trying to set rules
    that enable people to make the most of their own lives, whether it's the
    Family and Medical Leave Act that tries to help people succeed at home
    and at work by saying you don't lose your job if you have to take a
    little time off when there's a baby born or a sick parent, or the new
    meat standards for testing that we propose to stop children from getting
    the E. coli virus in meat. We try to set rules within which people can
    work together, in which our free market can work, in which people's
    creativity can work, in which local communities can solve their own
    problems.
        I worked very hard on the economy and on the security issues. But
    I've also, perhaps because I was Governor of a small State for 12 years,
    worked very hard to put the Federal Government on the side of people and
    communities who are struggling to make the most of their own lives and
    meet their challenges and protect their values and protect their
    children. We have proposed to help and support communities that wanted
    to do a number of things that we

    [[Page 1176]]

    thought would improve children's lives. And Monrovia is a sterling
    example of three of our major initiatives: the community policing, along
    with citizen participation; a tough truancy policy; and of course, the
    school uniform policy. And I wanted to thank you for that.
        Now, why is that important? Well, I'll just give you a classic
    example. I can come here to you and say--and be telling the truth--
    [laughter]--3\1/2\ years ago we instituted a new economic policy
    designed to drive the deficit down, get interest rates down, expand
    trade in American products and services, and continue to invest in our
    people and their education, in technology, in research, in helping
    communities make the transition who had been hurt by defense cutbacks so
    that we could all grow together. And the results have been good.
        We've cut the deficit from $290 billion a year to $117 billion a
    year, over 60 percent. That's a good thing. The National Government is
    as small as it was in 1965 now; we've reduced about 240,000. We've
    reduced 16,000 pages of Federal regulations, abolished hundreds of
    programs, but continued to invest in the fundamental things that matter
    in education, research and technology, and infrastructure. And the
    results have been good.
        The American people have created 10 million more jobs in the last
    3\1/2\ years. We have over 8 million people who have refinanced their
    homes at lower interest rates. We have 3.7 million new homeowners. We
    have the lowest rates of inflation and unemployment combined in 30
    years. We learned today that in the last 2 years homeownership in
    America had grown its fastest rate in 30 years in the last couple of
    years. That's all a very good thing. And we're better off than we were 4
    years ago. [Applause]
        But--I don't mind you clapping for it, but let me make the point
    here. [Laughter] If you were--if you could hear me say that and you
    could know with your mind it is true, but if you lived in a community
    where your number one worry was whether your children were safe, whether
    they were in school, whether your community was functioning, then it
    would still leave a hole in your heart. You would say, ``I hear that,
    but why am I not happy?'' Because we know that big statistics don't
    matter in individual lives unless good things are happening in
    individual lives, in families, on blocks, in communities.
        And that's where you come in. I hope by coming here today that we
    will put a face on the idea that the American people do not have to
    tolerate unacceptable rates of crime. The American people do not have to
    tolerate worrying whether their children are safe. The American people
    do not have to tolerate schools that are dysfunctional. If they will get
    ahold of their communities and work with their schools and work with
    their police departments we can turn this country around and we can take
    this country into the 21st century with the American dream alive for
    everybody, with a country that's coming together, not drifting apart.
    And you are the example of what every community can do if they will.
        I was delighted to hear your superintendent make the announcements
    about the building program. I just announced an effort in Washington to
    put a few billion dollars over the next 4 years into school
    construction, for the first time the National Government has ever done
    it, by lowering the interest rates for net new construction--things that
    were not going to be done anyway--to try to help all of our schools
    rebuild, including the poorest schools, to encourage them to go out and
    get their taxpayers to help, too, and say we'll try to ease the burden.
        We're working hard on trying to do what you just announced for next
    year, making sure that by within 4 years every classroom and every
    library in America is hooked up to the Internet. But here's another
    challenge for you: We're also working hard this summer to get 100,000
    teachers to train 500,000 other teachers to use the Internet with their
    students properly.
        Now, think about this. Now, let me give you some idea of what this
    can mean. I was in New Jersey the other day with the Vice President. And
    I think New Jersey has the second highest per capita income in America,
    but it also has some of the poorest school districts in America. I was
    in one of the poorer school districts where a huge generation of the
    students are in first--excuse me--a huge percentage of the students are
    in first generation immigrant families. This school district, compared
    to those enormously wealthy and wonderfully well-staffed and well-
    equipped suburban schools in New Jersey, had a high dropout rate, a low
    college-going rate, a low performance rate, a lot of problems.

    [[Page 1177]]

        And Bell Atlantic went in there in partnership with the community
    and with the schools. They put computers in the schools. They put
    computers in the homes of some of the family members. And they taught
    the teachers to use the equipment and the software so that those
    children would literally have access to the same quality of knowledge
    that any children in any school district anywhere in this country had.
    Within 2 years, the dropout rate was below the State average, and the
    test scores were above the State average, in a poor immigrant school
    district. We can do this if we'll do it together. And that's what you
    are doing.
        I was delighted to hear your chief talk about the statistics you've
    achieved with community policing. When I became President after the 1992
    election, I had already actually been to Los Angeles County--in 1990, I
    believe it was, or '91--to look at a community policing experiment. I'd
    seen them working all over the country. And the most important thing to
    me was that they proved that people didn't have to put up with
    unacceptable crime rates, but that the police could not do it alone. The
    police had to go back to the streets, but the people who lived on the
    streets had to come back to the police, and they had to work together
    hand in hand.
        So when I asked the Congress to adopt the new crime bill, the most
    highly publicized parts of it--and they were important--were, first,
    passing the Brady bill and, second, passing the ban on assault weapons.
    By the way, since the Brady bill became law, no hunter has lost a rifle,
    contrary to the rhetoric. [Laughter] But 60,000--60,000--felons,
    fugitives, and stalkers have not been able to buy handguns, and it's a
    good thing. It's a good law, and it's the right thing to do.
        Anyway, the most important thing over the long run and about the
    crime bill was that it contained a mechanism to put 100,000 more police
    officers on the street. These police departments we were asking to go
    out and adopt community policing, many of them were in areas where, as
    with the Nation, the violent crime rate had tripled in 30 years, gone up
    by 300 percent, but the police forces had only increased by 10 percent.
    Literally we had police departments that were overwhelmed by trying to
    catch up to crimes that had already been committed without the resources
    to reorganize themselves to prevent crime from being committed in the
    first place and use friends and neighbors to catch the criminals once
    they do commit crimes.
        And so we began this work. We've now funded 43,000 of these police,
    over 6,000 of them to the State of California, over 2,000 to Los Angeles
    County. And it's beginning to make a difference, but not because of
    anything we did in the National Government. All we did was to try to
    give more communities the tools to do what you're doing here, because
    you can achieve these results, and you deserve an enormous amount of
    credit for doing it.
        What I'm hoping is that by being here today, we'll get enough
    publicity out of this so that 200 or 300 other communities will call
    here in a week or two, they'll call the principal, the superintendent,
    the chief of police, the mayor, and they'll say, ``Help me do this. Help
    me do this.''
        On the crime issue, let me also encourage you not to let up. Don't
    let up. Keep helping the police. Keep working with them. These crime
    statistic drops are very impressive, but the crime rate is still too
    high in America. It is still too high. And it will be too high until you
    are surprised when the evening news leads off with a crime story. That's
    when you'll know that we're in good shape, when you're surprised.
        Let me also say that these things you are doing in the schools with
    the truancy and the uniform initiatives may wind up being the most
    important anticrime initiatives you'll ever adopt. Because we have had
    one deeply troubling development in the last 3\1/2\ years, that if you
    had told me this in 1992 I would not have believed it, for the crime
    rate is about to go down 4 years in a row, but the rate of violent crime
    among young people between the age of 12 and 17 is still going up. The
    rate of cocaine use in America has dropped a third, but the rate of
    casual drug use among young people between the ages of 12 and 17 is
    still going up. And as any educator can tell you, when school starts
    this fall, there will be almost 52 million young people in school, the
    largest class in public schools since the baby boom. And the people that
    are coming in now to kindergarten and first grade for the next several
    years are going to be very, very large classes in our country. We have
    about 6 years to get ahead of this juvenile crime and violence and drug
    problem before we have a problem on our hands that will be almost
    unmanageable, unbearable, and painful.

    [[Page 1178]]

        So that's another reason I'm here. I know it. I told the principal
    and the superintendent and the chief I hoped I'd caused a lot of work
    for them in the next few weeks, because other communities have got to do
    this. We simply cannot let the largest number of schoolchildren in
    history come into our schools and grow up into adolescence in a country
    that is coming apart when it ought to be coming together, when there is
    no excuse for it, since we know what to do, and you're doing it. That's
    the point that I want to drive home to America.
        Let me say that on this antitruancy program, this may seem simple to
    you, and I was--where is the officer, Chief, you gave credit to? He
    didn't stand up. Where is he? Stand up. Where did he go? Over there.
    Thank you. Give him another hand. [Applause] Now, you might ask yourself
    why other people don't do this. The answer is it probably hasn't
    occurred to them, and they may not think they can do it. You have proven
    that it can be done and you can get results.
        In the school uniform policy, I understand that that's--you said it
    was unpopular with your kids the first time you mentioned it. I could go
    to any place in America and speak to young people and have them cheering
    and stomping until I mention school uniforms and then they go, ``No-o-
    o!'' [Laughter] You may know this, but I went to Long Beach a few weeks
    ago, and I had two students stand up and talk about it. And one of the
    young people said, ``We got to pick our uniforms, and we picked green
    and white because the gangs were heavy in our area and they wore red and
    blue. And it's the first time in 3 years I've been able to walk to and
    from school without looking over my shoulder.'' That's worth something.
        And then one of the things that was said here about it, a young
    woman said, ``It's wonderful now, but it's as good for the wealthy kids
    as it is for the poor kids because now we judge ourselves by what we are
    on the inside and not what we have on the outside.'' These are good
    values to get across to our young people. So I just want to encourage
    you in this.
        Not very long ago, I was in New Orleans talking about their curfew
    policy. New Orleans used to have one of the highest crime rates in the
    country, and they had all these kids on the street at night. So they
    started a curfew policy, as a number of other cities had, that was very
    rigorous. But they also set up a curfew center manned by ministers and
    by psychologists and by health care professionals. And I was so moved
    when I heard the story of one 7-year-old boy that was picked up
    wandering the streets at midnight. And they took him to the curfew
    center, and the lady who was working that night said, ``What do you
    want?'' And he said, ``I want somebody to hold me.'' Now, if that boy
    had been found 8 years later, he might have been booked in jail for a
    felony. Maybe he won't be now, because he found somebody to hold him.
        We have got to take responsibility for the fabric of our children's
    lives in this community. One of you kindly mentioned the concept village
    that my wife put in her book. We are responsible for all these kids. One
    of the reasons this juvenile crime rate is still going up is there's too
    many of these children out here virtually raising themselves on the
    street. And they don't know how to do it. It's hard for parents if you
    do know how to do it. They don't know how to do it.
        People get into gangs partly because everybody wants to be part of
    something that's bigger than they are. We all do. When you let kids wear
    school uniforms, you're putting them in a good gang. The police wear
    uniforms; they're in a good gang. That's what it is; you identify
    yourself with something that's bigger than you are. That's what it is.
        I hope you will all become apostles. I bet every one of you has
    friends or family members that live in other communities, perhaps in
    other States. They need to know about this. Because as President, we can
    put out guidelines to show schools how they can adopt these uniform
    policies and have no legal problems, how they can have truancy policies
    and have no legal problems, how they can have curfews and have no legal
    problems; that's what we're doing. The Department of Education is
    putting out guidelines on character education and other kinds of reforms
    that are based on teaching values and helping to recover our kids. We
    can pass the safe and drug-free schools bill and give more funds to more
    communities so everybody can have a D.A.R.E. program like you do,
    because they work and they really make a difference in children's lives.
        We can, in other words, give you the tools that you need to do more
    with your own community, your own family, and your own education, your
    own future. But we can't do any

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    of it for you. And if you look at the real challenges facing America,
    the fundamentally critical ones are those that will have to be dealt
    with one on one, child by child, family by family, school by school,
    neighborhood by neighborhood. And my job is to try to highlight these
    things and to see that we in Washington do what we can to support you
    and give you the tools you need to succeed. But if every community in
    America tomorrow would decide to organize themselves the way you have
    and to do what you have done, the differences would be breathtaking
    within a matter of 2 years.
        That is what I am hoping and praying for, because I'm telling you,
    there is no country in the world as well-positioned as the United States
    for the 21st century. We understand what it means to be in a global
    village. We understand what it means to be in an era dominated by
    information and technology, where education is at a premium. And unlike
    most other countries, everybody from every place else in the world is
    already here anyway--[laughter]--which is an enormous asset for us.
        I wish you could have been with Hillary and me the other day when we
    went to visit the Olympic team in Atlanta. We had them all in an
    auditorium like this. We had a lot of the senior Olympians that came
    back, who were the heroes of these present-day Olympians when they were
    little kids. And we had a great time. But I looked out at them and it
    just occurred to me, you know, if they were all separated, just walking
    around in the village, you might think the Americans were part of one of
    the Asian teams, one of the Middle Eastern teams, one of the Latin
    American teams, one of the Nordic teams, one of the European teams, one
    of the African teams, because we're from everywhere. We're bound
    together by the ideals and the values enshrined in the Constitution and
    the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence and by a sense of
    mutual respect and the ability to work together.
        And that's the last point I want to make. Every single thing we have
    celebrated here today is rooted in the willingness of people here to
    work in partnership. I'll bet you in all these projects you've talked
    about, when you're enforcing the truancy laws or implementing the school
    uniform policy or walking the neighborhood blocks, it doesn't matter if
    you're a Republican or a Democrat or an independent. It doesn't matter
    what your race is, doesn't matter what your religion is, doesn't much
    matter what your income is. Nobody can hide from these things today.
    We're all in this together.
        And I see you out here, sitting together, applauding your local
    leaders, applauding what you have done together. And all I can say to
    you is, please, please, please, number one, keep it up, find ways to
    increase it. And number two, find ways to talk to your friends and
    neighbors around the State and around the country about this, because
    what you are doing will determine whether we can go raring into the 21st
    century united and strong.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:26 p.m. in the auditorium at Monrovia
    High School. In his remarks, he referred to Joseph Santoro, chief of
    police, and Mayor Robert T. Bartlet of Monrovia; Yolanda Gallardo, board
    of education member, Monrovia Unified School District; and Willie
    Williams, chief of police, Los Angeles.