[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 30 (Monday, July 29, 1996)]
[Pages 1314-1319]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Community 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. [Laughter] 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 millenium, 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 drugrunning 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

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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 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 
a hold 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--[applause]--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,

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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.
    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

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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.
    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. [Laughter]

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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 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 neighbhorhood 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.

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