    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [January 14, 1999]
    [Pages 41-43]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on the Next Generation COPS Initiative in Alexandria, Virginia
    January 14, 1999

        Madam Attorney General; Deputy Attorney
    General Holder; Associate Attorney
    General Fisher; Mayor Donley; Chief Samarra; all
    the members of the Alexandria police force; to all the other chiefs and
    law enforcement officials who are here; the representatives of law
    enforcement who are here; Gil Gallegos, the
    president of the National FOP; Sam Cabral, the
    International Union of Police Associations president; Ron
    Neubauer, the International Association
    of Chiefs of Police president: I am delighted to see all of you.
        I really enjoyed listening to Senator Biden and Senator Robb reminisce
    about how this bill came to be. I want to say a special word of thanks,
    if I might, to the team at the Justice Department and especially to Joe
    Brann, who himself is a former chief of police,
    the Director of our COPS program. Thank you, Joe, for doing such a great
    job with our police officers. [Inaudible]
        You know, when I asked Janet Reno to be
    Attorney General, she had been the prosecutor in Miami. And the main
    thing I wanted to do with the Justice Department was to deal with what I
    thought the biggest problem in America was at that time--legal problem--
    which is that there was a very, very high crime rate, and the violent
    crime rate was especially high. And there was--I had spent a lot of time
    both as attorney general of my own State and as a Governor. I had run a
    prison system and watched it explode. I had managed a large State police
    operation. Then, as a Governor and later as a candidate, I had actually
    walked the streets and been in the neighborhoods of New York,
    Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, San Antonio, Los Angeles, looking for
    strategies that worked to bring the crime rate down.
        And so when I asked Janet Reno to come on, I
    said, ``The most important thing is that the local police, the local
    prosecutors, the local mayors, the people that are out there worrying
    about the crime rate, they have to know not only that we are their
    friends but we are their partners. And we're going to stop doing what
    normally happens in Washington, which is that you make speeches and talk
    tough and nothing happens. I would rather say less and do more.'' And by
    1993, when I took office, we were beginning to see in many major cities
    crime rates go down because of the development at the local level of
    community policing strategies.
        And it is true that we would never have been able to do this without
    the leadership of Senator Biden and the
    support of Senator Robb. We finally were
    able to pass that crime bill, to get into community policing, to have
    100,000 police on the street, to ban the assault weapons, to build more
    prisons, to have more prevention

    [[Page 42]]

    programs to keep kids out of trouble in the first place. And I would
    like to say a special word of appreciation to law enforcement for
    proving that Joe and Chuck and I were right. You see a guy like Joe
    Biden up here, full of enthusiasm--
    wouldn't it break your heart if it turned out to be wrong? What kind of
    speech--can you imagine him giving a hang-dog speech? It would have been
    terrible. [Laughter]
        So I want to thank you. I want to thank you for a lot of things, for
    staying with us with the assault weapons ban, for staying with us with
    the Brady bill, which has now kept a quarter of a million--a quarter of
    a million--felons, fugitives, and stalkers from getting handguns. I want
    to thank you for proving that there are people like Irma Rivera out there in America--all over America--who want to wear
    uniforms and make the streets safer and give our kids their futures
    back. She was terrific, wasn't she? Let's give her another hand.
    [Applause] Thank you.
        So we're very happy. If you look there at the reduction in crime on
    that chart, you see that crime rates overall have dropped to a 25-year
    low; property crime down; violent crimes declined 20 percent in the last
    6 years. The murder rate is at its lowest level nationwide in 30 years,
    mostly due to the dropping number of young people with guns. We can take
    a lot of pride in what has happened and in the strategy that has brought
    it about.
        We have seen the impact of more police. We've seen the impact of the
    prevention programs, of the penalties, the efforts to get guns out of
    the hands of criminals, the burning out of the crack epidemic, thank the
    Lord. And we've seen greater peace of mind coming, probably more than
    anything else, from the presence of the police on the street, in the
    neighborhood, in a preventive, cooperative fashion. And that is very,
    very good.
        Now, having said all that, I want to go back to a point Senator
    Biden made. Dealing with crime, now that it's down, is kind of like
    dealing with the economy. We've got the lowest unemployment rate in 29
    years. But it doesn't mean anything to somebody without a job or to a
    depressed neighborhood. And given how volatile things are in the world--
    all you have to do is pick up the paper every day and read about it--
    we've got to stay on the economy.
        The same thing is true of crime, except in some ways more so,
    because, yes, the crime rate is the lowest it's been in 30 years, and
    you heard the Attorney General say that means there will be under 3
    million victims. Three million people is a lot of people--3 million
    families, 3 million friends. I don't know anyone who seriously believes
    that we have a country as safe as it ought to be. I don't know anyone
    who seriously believes that we're saving every young person and keeping
    them out of trouble in the first place. I don't know anyone who
    seriously believes that we can be the kind of country we want to be if
    we have to continue these levels of incarceration, if we have to
    continue spending more and more money on prisons that we ought to be
    spending on education, on after-school programs, on summer school
    programs, on keeping these kids out of trouble in the first place.
        So I say, in spite of all this celebration, what we should do is to
    say, ``Okay, we know what works. Now let's bear down and keep doing it
    until we have got this problem as small as it can possibly be.'' No
    serious person thinks that we are there. So, for my money, what we ought
    to be doing today is saying, ``Hallelujah, this works! Now let's keep on
    doing it until we have squeezed every last drop of possibility for peace
    and security out of this strategy.''
        We are, as you have heard, on time, ahead of schedule, under budget
    with the 100,000 police program. In fact, we have already funded more
    than 92,000 of the 100,000 community police. We will fund them all in
    the near future, and that is very, very encouraging.
        Now, we also have to deal with the fact--you heard Senator Biden
    mention this--that our community policing effort is set to expire in the
    year 2000. I still believe we need to do more. It's still dangerous
    work; 155 of your colleagues lost their lives in the last year. It's
    still a numbers game in some places.
        When we started this 100,000 police program, the violent crime rate
    had tripled in the previous 30 years, but the size of the police forces,
    in the aggregate, had gone up only 10 percent. So we got the violent
    crime rate and the overall crime rate coming down, but there's still not
    an intersection. In other words, the police force is going from 500,000
    to 600,000--that's a 20 percent increase--but we still need to do more.
        Now, today I came here to say that in my balanced budget proposal to
    the Congress, which I will unveil at the State of the Union Address, we
    will have nearly $1.3 billion, an

    [[Page 43]]

    increase of more than $6 billion over 5 years--$1.3 billion for the next
    year, budget year--to renew our community policing program. This will
    help to hire and redeploy an additional 30-50,000 community police
    officers over that same period. It will be the best investment we can
    make in a safe future for our children, and I hope we can pass it with
    your help.
        We also, as has already been said, need to make sure that our police
    officers have 21st century tools to do their jobs. Today, drug dealers
    communicate by cell phones and pagers; scam artists work the Internet;
    gangs carry cutting-edge weaponry. Criminals have the best technology.
    Police should, too. Therefore, today I propose we devote $350 million in
    the balanced budget to put crime-fighting technology into the hands of
    police officers.
        For too long, we have seen some criminals go free because the
    methods used to gather evidence were not up-to-date. But when police can
    report from their squad cars, rather than return to the station to fill
    out paperwork, they spend more time on the beat. When officers can track
    crime as it happens, using innovative crime-mapping technology, they can
    respond more quickly and effectively.
        Chief Samarra has told us what a difference these new tools can make
    here in Alexandria. And the Vice President
    has put together a task force to help more communities take maximum
    advantage of available technology.
        Police carry a heavy burden, but we know they can't carry it alone,
    and we have to do more to engage all our communities in the fight
    against crime, to help win the fight police have been waging so
    successfully.
        We also have in this budget additional funds for community-based
    crime-fighting, everything from neighborhood DA's to work closely with
    police and residents, to faith-based organizations to help to prevent
    juvenile crime.
        And I want to say one last thing about the role of the police. We
    could never have gotten the prevention funds we have gotten in the last
    5 years if the law enforcement community hadn't advocated it. I was
    astonished when I came to Washington to see how many Members of Congress
    were literally afraid to vote for prevention, afraid that people back
    home would think they were soft on crime or weak or looking the other
    way. But when all the people in uniform who had their lives on the line
    came up and testified, ``Hey, we cannot jail our way out of this
    problem. We've got to keep more of these kids out of trouble in the
    first place. That's the least expensive, most humane, most ethical to
    proceed here''--you made it possible for these programs to work.
        One of the things that's really going to help you do your job is
    something that is going to be in my education budget I announced last
    week. We are going to triple the funds for after-school programs to keep
    kids learning in school--something positive, rather than learning
    something negative on the streets--when during the hours after school
    the juvenile crime rate soars. None of this would have been possible if
    the police officers of the country hadn't been willing to come to the
    Congress and say, ``Hey, this works. Help us keep these kids out of
    trouble in the first place.'' So we thank you for that as well.
        America is grateful for the hard work of our men and women in
    uniform. Every day you make our streets and schools safer, our homes
    more secure, and in so doing--make no mistake about it--you make freedom
    more real for the American people. We know you can't do it alone. We've
    tried to be good partners. We intend to be better partners as we move to
    the next century.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:42 a.m. at the Alexandria Police
    Station. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Kerry J. Donley of
    Alexandria; Chief Charles E. Samarra, Alexandria Police Department; and
    Officer Irma Rivera, Arlington County Police Department. The President
    also referred to the Community Oriented Police Services (COPS) program.