[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 29, Number 38 (Monday, September 27, 1993)]
[Pages 1872-1877]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Community in St. Petersburg, Florida

 September 24, 1993

    Thank you very much. We are delighted to be here today, all of us. 
I'm especially glad that Attorney General Reno came down from Washington 
with me. When she became the Attorney General, Florida gave the United 
States a great national resource, and I know you're all proud of the job 
that she has done.
    I also want to thank my longtime friend Governor Chiles. You know, 
in his former life Governor Chiles was a Member of the United States 
Senate and was head of the budget committee. He thought arithmetic was 
functioning better at the State and local level, and so he decided to 
leave Washington. But when he left, it made it harder for the rest of us 
to make arithmetic work in Washington. And I'm glad to be here with him, 
and I especially honor the innovations that he has pushed in health care 
and in crime.
    I want to thank Congressman Bill Young for hosting me in his 
district and for coming down last night on the plane. I'm also glad to 
see Congressman Miller here today and Congresswoman Karen Thurman from 
your neighboring districts.
    We had a remarkable health care forum last night, as you probably 
know, in Tampa, with about 1,000 people there. And there were six or 
seven Members of Congress, roughly evenly divided between Republicans 
and Democrats, who came there with me in

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our effort to bring this country together around that issue.
    I got a little briefing on St. Petersburg Beach from Mayor Horan 
when I was up here. He told me that we had a wide variety of ages here. 
I think--you said your grandson was here, and he's one year old today. 
Where--is the Mayor's grandson here? Hold up the Mayor's grandson. Look 
at that. And we have at least one of your distinguished citizens here 
who is in her nineties. Melita, stand up there. Thank you. In between, 
we've got a President; an Attorney General; a Governor; three Members of 
Congress; your State attorney general, Bob Butterworth, who is here; the 
Mayor of St. Petersburg, David Fisher; the chief of police of St. 
Petersburg, Darrel Stephens; a number of State representatives and 
county officials and representatives from community groups, Crime Watch 
and other groups.
    I say that to make this point: If you look out across this crowd 
today, from that young man celebrating his first birthday to this fine 
lady who has seen almost this entire century come and go, you see across 
this crowd people of different races, different political parties, 
different walks of life, all of us part of the family of America, all of 
us caught up now in a time of sweeping and profound change, change which 
opens up to us vistas of opportunity that our forebears could never have 
imagined and change which presents us with threats and troubles that our 
forebears never could have imagined.
    I really believe that in a time like this, my job as your President 
is to try to identify the challenges facing our country and then to try 
to offer my best ideas about a solution and then to try to energize 
people all across the country to work until we find a solution. Whether 
it's the one I suggested or some other one, we have to urgently face 
both the opportunities and the problems before us in a time when we have 
to change so much.
    And that's the first decision we all have to make. Whether it's in 
education or the economy, we have to be willing to change. When you're 
confronted with a time of sweeping changes, with a bunch of things that 
are happening that are good that you can be part of and a bunch of 
things that are happening that are bad that you want to avoid, basically 
you have two options. You can sort of hunker down and put your arms 
around yourself and hope it will go away; that works about one time in a 
hundred. And then if you play the odds, 99 percent of the time what you 
have to do is take a deep breath and stick your chest out and turn right 
into the change and figure out what you can do.
    Now, one of the things that all of us have learned in our lives, 
that even children learn early, is that you are more able to make 
changes you need to make when you are more secure. The more personally 
secure you are, the more you feel good about who you are and your 
connections to other people and your roots in a community, the more you 
are able to change. It seems almost ironic, but the more rooted you are 
in the traditionally human ties and the traditional human values that 
make life so rich, the more you're able to change so that you can 
enhance what you value. The more insecure we are, the more difficult it 
is for us to change because we're too busy just trying to survive.
    So, in a funny way, the pursuit that we must have as a people for 
security is tied closely to the pursuant we must have as a people for 
change. And I believe as strongly as I can say that that's one of the 
reasons that makes this campaign for health care reform so important, 
that it will give our people the security to change. And it's one of the 
things that makes our efforts to try to reduce the crime rate and 
enhance human decency and dignity and reduce violence and destruction in 
our country so important because that is the security we need, the 
bedrock we need to make the economic changes, to make the education and 
training changes, to make the other changes we need in this country.
    Last night, when we had that wonderful town hall meeting, people 
asked dozens and dozens of questions--I don't know how long we stayed 
there; it was way too late. [Laughter] There are a lot of people in 
America, if they watched that whole show last night, are sleepy at work 
today, I'll tell you that. But what you saw there is people yearning for 
security.
    Here in this area, the principles I announced in health care reform 
are very much related to the principles of this anticrime effort our 
administration is undertaking. Secu- 

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rity, health care that you've always got, that can't be taken away. 
Simplify the system; it's a nightmare for the doctors and the nurses and 
the people who are getting health care. Achieve savings, because the 
system is too wasteful, you can't justify putting more money in a broken 
machine until you've fixed it. Maintain choice for consumers and have 
quality. One of the things that matters so much in Florida is the idea 
that people on Medicare as well as people on Medicaid will be able to 
get prescription drugs now under this program, very important for older 
people to maintain their quality of life. And finally, to have more 
responsibility in the system. And that relates directly to the crime 
issue because one of the reasons American health care is so expensive is 
that our hospitals and our emergency rooms are full of people who are 
cut up and shot. If you look at the amount of money the American 
taxpayers pay in health care for violence, it is staggering. And the 
more we do that, the less we have to spend on other things that make us 
all well and more secure.
    Now, one of the things that our health care reform package and the 
crime initiatives that the Attorney General is leading have in common is 
a focus on prevention. You know, I got a great hand the other night 
talking to Congress, and I said, ``You know how your mother said an 
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? Well, your mother was 
right.'' Well, that's the truth. For the first time, if we pass this 
health care reform program, everybody will have in their health care 
package preventive services. We will save money and enhance the quality 
of life, enhance security if you give every child an immunization plan, 
if you have well-baby visits, if you have Pap smears and mammograms and 
cholesterol tests and the kinds of things that keep people well as well 
as help them to get well if they get sick.
    The same thing is true in crime. We know from experience after 
experience after experience that the kind of violence that has 
unfortunately gripped the headlines in Florida in the last several days 
and grieved so many of us as Americans, when people who come to our 
shores are hurt or killed when they want to see our country and they 
want to get to know the best about it, that is far from a problem of 
Florida alone. And certainly not a problem for our foreign visitors 
alone. When Michael Jordan's father was killed recently, a nation 
grieved, but no one knew the names of the other 22 people who died in 
that county this year. This is a national problem.
    When I was born in 1946, homicide wasn't even in the top ten leading 
causes of death in America. In fact, listen to this, throughout my 
lifetime homicide never made the top ten until 1989. And yet, now, 
homicide is the second leading cause of death among Americans age 15 to 
25. And more of our teenage boys die from gunshots now than any other 
cause.
    Now, we can decide again what to do with this. Are we going to 
hunker down and turn away and pretend it's not happening? Maybe it will 
go away; we've got a one chance in a hundred that will happen. Or we can 
face it, and we can face the problem in all of its human manifestations, 
just the way the Attorney General said.
    These kids we just met out here who got in trouble and now they're 
in this program, pretty good kids. They've got a whole life ahead of 
them. They've got contributions they can make. And we need to see what 
we can do about preventing the life that might happen that none of us 
want to occur.
    This initiative that we have undertaken in our administration to 
give more security and to make this society safer includes at least 
three forms of prevention I want to emphasize, because we know they work 
and because they are rooted in getting people at the grassroots 
community level more power over their own lives.
    First is giving these children who get in trouble something to say 
yes to and some order and framework in their lives. Senator Moynihan 
said on television last Sunday, the distinguished Senator from New York 
who's been a student of American social history for 50 years, ``We have 
gotten used to accepting a lot of behavior from people in this country 
that's pretty destructive. We have gotten used to the fact that a lot of 
kids grow up alone or almost alone in conditions that are very damaging 
to themselves and aren't conducive to learning good things and good 
habits.'' And we have let it happen. But all over America there are 
programs like the boot

[[Page 1875]]

camp program. One of these young men just came out of the boot camp 
program of this program and he told the Governor that he liked the 
program. More people ought to be in it, because, he said, ``It used to 
be you could''-- he knew this--he said, ``It used to be you could ship 
kids my age off to the service, but we're going down. We don't have a 
draft anymore. We're going down in the number of people in the service. 
So we've got to have a substitute where people can learn discipline and 
order and be able to see the future as something that happens 3 years 
from now, not 3 minutes from now.'' And we have to have programs like 
this Marine Institute, which now is spreading across the country. This 
program is giving young people a chance to take their future back, a 
chance to understand that there is good inside them, that they can do 
things that are useful and productive and profitable and a lot more fun 
than whatever it is that got them into this program in the first place.
    Those young people told me what it was like to learn how to give 
CPR, to learn how to scuba dive, to learn how to repair a boat and fix 
it so it would sail, to learn how to deal with each other and with 
adults so that they could get jobs. This program now operates in 
partnership with grassroots people in seven other States nationwide. 
They've taken 20,000 young people at risk and helped them to become 
responsible citizens. And so far, after they leave this program 75 
percent of the young people that go through this program never have any 
criminal convictions again. If every young person in America that got in 
trouble had a chance to be in a program like this, think what a 
difference it would make. It's very important. How many times do you 
pick up the paper and read about somebody finally did something terrible 
after they had been arrested 13 times or 15 times or 20 times. We need a 
system in this country, and the National Government cannot do it, but we 
can help you do it. We can help provide funds and support and technical 
expertise, but people at the grassroots level have to do it. We've got 
to have systems in this country where everybody in those critical young 
years has a chance to be in a boot camp like this, like you have in 
Florida, or a program like the Marine Institute or both if they need it.
    We have an experimental program we started last June. Ten military 
facilities have been enclosed across the country where kids who are high 
school dropouts are able to come back and get their GED and have the 
benefit of military-type training. And a lot of these kids just love it. 
It's just changed their whole outlook on life. We have got to understand 
that we are raising a generation without the structure and order and 
predictability and support and reinforcement that most of us just took 
for granted. We took it for granted. And there's no use in us pretending 
that some National Government program and money alone will fix it. But 
there's no use in us pretending that just preaching at people will fix 
it, either. We have to actually change the conditions of opportunity for 
these young people.
    The second thing we have to do is to recognize that our police 
forces can do more if they're more closely connected to the community, 
if there are enough of them, and if they operate in the same 
neighborhoods and concentrate on the problem areas. The buzzword for 
that is community policing. And it works. It works. I have been in 
cities all across America where the crime rate is dropping because of 
concentrated community policing strategy where police work in 
partnership with the citizens who live in a community, focus their 
resources on the areas of greatest opportunity, respond quickly to 
problems. I have seen that. That works.
    The chief of police of St. Petersburg, Darrel Stephens, who's here, 
has been one of our Nation's leading promoters of community policing. 
And it does move away from the old ways of trying to catch criminals 
after a crime occurs to doing as much as you can to prevent crime in the 
first place. That drives down the crime rate.
    This year under Attorney General Reno's leadership, our Department 
of Justice will fund five community policing projects in our Nation to 
serve as models for the rest of the country. In a competitive process, 
the Justice Department tried to find rural examples and urban examples, 
small and medium sized towns as well as big ones. Due to the strength of 
the programs in your communities, the

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Justice Department has selected two of the five prototypes to be here in 
Florida, one in St. Petersburg, and the other in Hillsboro County, right 
next door. And these funds--not massive amounts of money, $200,000 
apiece--will enable these communities to strengthen their own community 
policing programs and develop them in a way that can be copied by other 
communities.
    One of the things that the Attorney General and I were talking about 
on the way up here is it never ceases to amaze me that nearly every 
problem in America has been addressed well by somebody somewhere, but we 
don't learn very well from one another yet. And one of the things that 
this Government is dedicated to doing in my administration is taking 
what works at the grassroots level and giving other people a chance to 
do it. And I thank you for that.
    Now, the third thing I want to emphasize and the third thing I think 
we have to recognize is if you want to prevent crime in this country, 
violent crime, if you want to stop gunshot wounds from being the leading 
cause of death among young teenage boys, if you want to change the 
circumstance in which the average age of people killing each other is 
now under 16 in some of our cities, you have to change the fact that 
America is the only country in the civilized world where a teenager can 
walk the street at random and be better armed than most police forces. 
We have to face that fact. The crime bill, which was introduced just a 
couple of days ago in both the Senate and the House, contains more funds 
for more police officers on the street, something I believe in, we want 
to put another 100,000 out there in America so everybody can adopt a 
community policing strategy. It also has the Brady bill which will 
require a 5-day waiting period before anybody can purchase a handgun. 
And in addition to that, there are several bills in the Congress, and I 
hope and pray one of them can reach my desk this year, which will ban 
various types of assault weapons entirely from being held in the 
possession of our young people.
    Let me tell you something, folks. I come from a State where more 
than half the adults have a hunting or a fishing license or both, where 
most of us were in the woods by the time we were 6 years old, where some 
schools and some plants have to be closed on the opening day of deer 
season. Nobody shows up anyway. [Laughter] There's not a person in this 
country that values the culture of the outdoors and the hunting and all 
of that any more than I do. But neither those who love to hunt, or who 
love to shoot weapons in contests, nor the framers of the Constitution 
when they wrote the second amendment ever envisioned a time when 
children on our streets would illegally be in possession of weapons 
designed solely to kill other people and have more weapons than the 
people who were supposed to be policing them. And we better stop it if 
we want to recover our country.
    Just last week the Governor of Colorado, Governor Roy Romer, signed 
a law that prohibits juveniles from owning handguns. He joined Governor 
Florio of New Jersey and 17 others who have passed that law this year.
    These are things we have to do. All three of these things are 
preventive. They're worth a pound of cure. Have more programs like this 
one. Give these kids a chance to have something to say yes to, not just 
telling them what they have to say no to, and a chance to order their 
lives and to fill themselves from the inside out. A lot of these 
programs don't deal with people from the inside out. That's the only way 
you can really change people's lives.
    Give our police forces a chance to succeed with a community-based 
strategy that prevents crimes as well as catches criminals. And get the 
guns out of the hands of the kids. Give our law enforcement officers a 
fighting chance to keep the streets safe and people secure.
    These are elements of prevention that will give us the security we 
need to make the changes we need economically to move into the 21st 
century. They will have the extra benefit of dramatically lowering the 
costs of health care and enabling us to finance the kind of progress we 
need in health care which again will give us the security we need to be 
the people we have to be in this dynamic era.
    Thank you very much, and God bless you all.

[[Page 1877]]

Note: The President spoke at 10:14 a.m. at the Pinellas Marine 
Institute.