[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 31, Number 31 (Monday, August 7, 1995)]
[Pages 1353-1355]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]
<R04>
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
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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.
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
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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 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 by satellite at 12:45 p.m. from Room 459 of
the Old Executive Office Building to the FOP conference in Virginia
Beach, VA.