[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 43 (Monday, October 28, 1996)]
[Pages 2169-2172]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks in Marrero, Louisiana

October 24, 1996

    Thank you. Thanks. Thank you very much. Well, let me--I was 
listening to Yvonne McPherson talk, wondering if she was Reverend 
McPherson. [Laughter] And when she really got stirred up I thought, if 
this lady passes the plate we're all going to leave here broke. 
[Laughter]
    Thank you. Thank you for your wonderful, wonderful words and your 
wonderful example. Thank you, Lieutenant Renee Washington, for your 18 
years and for the work you're doing to make our children safer and for 
your great remarks. I want to thank all of you for making all of us who 
don't live here feel so welcome tonight.
    I understand the West Jefferson High School Band played. I thank 
them for that. I want to thank Congressman Cleo Fields for coming with 
me tonight and for all the work he's doing on our behalf. Thank you. My 
good friend Congressman Bill Jefferson, who plays both sides of the 
river here, and that's good politics. Sometimes it's not good in public 
life to straddle the fence, but I picked up pretty quick it's a good 
thing to straddle this river. [Laughter] If his in-laws hadn't been from 
here, I think he would have moved them over here just to make sure he 
was covered.
    Thank you, my good friend Senator John Breaux, for all you do for 
Louisiana and all you've done for me. Thank you, and God bless you, sir. 
Thank you, Mary Landrieu, for running for the Senate and for standing up 
for what is right and supporting our crime program. Thank you. And 
Sheriff, thank you. I want to thank everybody in the sheriff's 
department who's worked on this program. I understand that Deputy Chief 
Gus Clavery has done a lot of work on it and others have. But this STAR 
program is an example of an issue that I think is very important.
    When I ran for President, I found people all over America frustrated 
and angry by the crime problem but nearly resigned to it. There were no 
new ideas in many places, so people said, ``Just throw the book at them 
and leave me alone and I'll duck and dodge the bullets''--everywhere. 
But there were, thank goodness, a number of local leaders in law 
enforcement like Harry Lee--there isn't really nobody like Harry Lee, 
but you know what I mean. [Laughter] People that--I wasn't going to say 
this, but I'm going to say this. As you know, it's fairly well known 
throughout the country that I enjoy a meal now and then. [Laughter] And 
last time I came to New Orleans--I always love to come here, and I'm 
always angry if they make me leave without eating when I'm in here. So 
Harry took John Breaux and me to lunch, and I was finally with somebody 
I didn't have to be a bit embarrassed by enjoying my lunch with. I loved 
it. I loved it. And we had a good one, didn't we, Sheriff? [Laughter]
    But the important thing--let me get back to this. Law enforcement 
leaders like Harry Lee who understood--and I found them all around 
America--that it wasn't only important to do things right, it was 
important to do the right things, which is very different. It was one 
thing for a person with a badge and a uniform on to look tough, be 
strong, and not do anything wrong and quite another thing for a person 
to always be searching out new ideas, ways to involve people in not only 
solving crime but preventing crimes in the first place.
    You heard him say up here when he talked--he just picked up on 
something I mentioned at lunch about the way New York City had 
dramatically lowered the crime rate by radically increasing its ability 
to move law enforcement officers around every day among neighborhoods 
based on where the crime was moving. So I come--the next time I come to 
Louisiana, he tells me he's instituted the same thing. That's what we 
need, local leadership, citizens like Yvonne McPherson, dedicated 
officers like Renee Washington, and law enforcement leaders like Harry 
Lee who want to do the right things as well as do things right.

[[Page 2170]]

    And I was astonished when I ran for President the extent to which 
people on the one hand were screaming for something to be done about 
crime and on the other hand, absolutely believed nothing could be done 
about it. Deep down inside they had sort of given up, but they wanted us 
to make the right moves and make some right noises but they didn't 
really believe we could take our streets, our schools, our 
neighborhoods, and ultimately, our children back.
    And I began to see things that changed my mind. I've told this story 
a lot of times, but I made a good friend one night early in 1992 when I 
was dropping in the polls in New Hampshire and people were writing my 
obituary. I went to New York City to a fundraiser, and frankly, I was a 
pretty sad case. I was feeling sorry for myself. And I was walking 
through the kitchen to get around like we sometimes do, to get around to 
where I was going to give the speech.
    And a Greek immigrant with a waiter's uniform stopped me. And he 
said, ``Now, Mr. President, my son is 10. He's in the fifth grade; he 
studies this election. He says I should vote for you, so I think I will 
vote for you, if you will do one thing for me.'' I said, ``What do you 
want? '' He said, ``I want to make my boy free.'' And I said, ``Well, 
sir,'' I said, ``Mr. Theofanis, this is a democracy.'' He said, ``Yes it 
is, but my boy is not free.'' He said, ``Where I lived before, I was 
poor, much poorer than I am here in New York. But at least we were free. 
Here, across the street from our apartment in New York, there is this 
beautiful park. I can't let my child go to the park unless I go with 
him. I'm lucky I live only 2 blocks from the school and it's actually 
quite a good school, but my boy can't walk down the street to the school 
unless I go with him. So I'll vote for you, but you have to make my boy 
free.''
    And I heard stories like this all over America. But I also saw 
neighborhoods in Los Angeles where the police had cut the response time 
down to 2 minutes. I saw streets in Philadelphia that had been infested 
by gangs and drugs, where neighborhood groups had worked with the police 
to take their streets back. And just a little bit, here and there I 
would see these glimmers of hope, and I promised myself that if I got 
elected President, I was going to take the politics out of crime and try 
to put the police and the people back into the business of lowering the 
crime rate and bringing safety back to America and restoring fundamental 
freedom.
    Now, the crime bill that you've heard everybody brag on--I 
appreciate that, all the credit they're trying to give me. All I did was 
take the politics out of crime. All we did was to let law enforcement 
people and community activists, like the folks that have spoken tonight, 
tell us what the Federal Government ought to do to be a good partner to 
help communities take their streets back and give their kids a future 
back. That is all we did.
    But as it turned out, that was quite a lot, because for 6 years, the 
debate in Washington had been a bunch of rhetoric and who could talk the 
toughest and who could do the least because they we didn't want anything 
to make any of the organized groups mad. And the problem was, nothing 
ever got done. So all we did was to let law enforcement officials, in 
effect, tell us what ought to be done, let community activists tell us 
what ought to be done; that's what the '94 crime bill was about.
    It's been a remarkable 4 years in the area of fighting crime. In 
this crime bill, we agreed that over a 5-year period, we'd fund 100,000 
police. After only 2 years, we've funded almost half of them, so we're 
ahead of schedule and under budget. As the sheriff said, there were no 
strings in this bill except one. There was just one string--the money 
had to be spent to hire law enforcement officers who would go on the 
street, not behind a desk. That was the only string. We said, ``You 
figure out who to hire; you figure out how to train them; you decide how 
to deploy them; you decide how you're going to relate to the community. 
It's all your decision. We don't know in Washington how to do that.''
    But we do know that in 30 years the violent crime rate has tripled 
and the police forces have only gone up by 10 percent in this country. 
There's no way you could do it. We had place after place after place 
that were more violent without any more police officers and they were 
covering less because they had to go around two at a time and then they 
had to get in the car, so nobody was on the street. And we were losing 
the battle because we

[[Page 2171]]

weren't doing the right things. So that's all we tried to do.
    We also passed a ``three strikes and you're out'' law for people who 
are prosecuted in Federal court for serious crimes. They do it a third 
time, they're not eligible for parole, not ever--and life imprisonment. 
We passed the capital punishment for drug kingpins and people who kill 
our law enforcement officers in the line of duty. We passed a strong 
safe and drug-free schools program to give our little children something 
to say yes to, to put more of those D.A.R.E. officers and other people 
out there in the classrooms when the kids were in grade school, saying 
drugs are wrong, drugs are illegal, drugs can kill you.
    We also--we're giving schools more funds to stay open later. I've 
fought to maintain the summer jobs program, I've fought to try to give 
our young people something to say yes to. I'm now trying to make sure we 
open the doors of college education to everybody, so no young person has 
to worry about whether they'll be able to afford to go to college if 
they stay in school and stay off drugs and stay out of trouble and make 
their grades. I think that's important. That's important.
    We've also tried to support more people, like Yvonne, in citizens 
groups. Over the next 4 years, we're going to try to mobilize another 
million volunteers to work with the police to get the crime rate down. 
San Diego, California, has the lowest crime rate of any of the 10 big 
cities in America, even though it's right on the border where we're 
constantly fighting illegal immigration and people trying to bring drugs 
across the border. They still have--in any of the 10 biggest cities, 
they've got the lowest crime rate.
    Why? One reason is, they have hundreds and hundreds of retired 
people who work in these citizens groups with the police not only to 
catch criminals, but to keep crime from happening in the first place, 
watching out for the little kids on the street, watching out for their 
neighbors. They know whenever somebody's gone on vacation, they watch 
their homes and they work together.
    So this is something we've got to do together. There's more to be 
done. We have to continue to support these police officers. You know, 
Harry Lee and I were laughing--I once had a lifetime membership in the 
NRA; I think it's been revoked now because I stood up for the Brady 
bill. But we didn't take any guns away from hunters or sportsmen, not a 
single one. We haven't done that. But at least 60,000 felons, fugitives, 
and stalkers couldn't get guns.

Now if you beat up your wife or your kids, you can't get a handgun under 
the new law. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. [Applause] I would 
oppose any effort to undermine my ability to duck hunt--[laughter]--or 
anybody's ability to be a championship skeet shooter or to do anything else 
that's appropriate and legal. But I still think we ought to ban those 
bullets that are build only for one purpose, to pierce the bullet-proof 
vests that our police officers wear. I don't see why we need those things 
out there.

    Let me tell you, we just started this program 2 years ago, as I 
said, when I signed the crime bill in 1994. Today I met with the first--
the family of the first one of the police officers hired under our crime 
bill, killed in the line of duty. I met here in Louisiana, in Lake 
Charles--I met with that officer's widow and two beautiful, beautiful 
young sons. And I thought to myself, you know, if people like these 
folks here are going to put their lives on the line for us, the least we 
can do is tell them if they put on a bullet-proof vest, it will protect 
them from being killed. That's the least we can do for them.
    And so what I want you to believe is, number one, this is not an 
accident, what Harry Lee said about reducing the violent crime rate and 
the crime rate by 85 percent. That is not an accident. That happened 
because people did the right things. The second thing I want you to 
believe is the Federal Government, your President, and the Congress; we 
can make a difference, and we are. But we're not doing it because of our 
political connections or philosophy. We're doing it because we took the 
politics out of crime. The third thing I want you to know is this could 
all be reversed. In the budget I vetoed last year, that the majority in 
Congress passed--they eliminated the 100,000 police program. Again, I 
had to stop them from trying to cut back on it. For reasons I do not 
understand, they do not believe in it. They tried to cut the safe and 
drug-free schools program in

[[Page 2172]]

half. Drug use is going down in America, folks, big time. But drug use 
among children under 18 is still going up. The last thing we need to do 
is to cut back on safe and drug-free schools effort. We need more adults 
in those schools talking to those kids.
    And my newest proposal, which is probably going to get me in trouble 
with some of the young people in America, but I want to say, look, 90 
percent of our kids are drug-free and we need to support them and we 
need to lift up the good kids and we need to give them something to say 
yes to. I want to say that again. We need to say it. But I'm going to 
ask those 90 percent to do something that may be unpopular with them. 
I'm going to ask them to go along with my proposal to get every State in 
the country to make a drug test part of getting a driver's license so we 
can find the other 10 percent and save their lives and help them and 
give them a chance for the future.
    I say again, you deserve most of the credit here, the sheriff, 
Lieutenant Washington, Yvonne McPherson, all of you that work in this, 
these police officers. You deserve the credit. But we have to do our 
part. And we have tried to do our part. And I want you to sustain this 
effort by what you say on November 5th. And I know what Mary Landrieu 
will say; she'll stay with us. She'll support us. And that's important.
    So I want you to help by sending people to Washington who will 
continue to take crime fighting out of politics and give it back to the 
people of every neighborhood in America. That's important, and Mary will 
do that. That's important. And I want you to continue to support these 
efforts here. But just remember this; if you don't remember anything 
else remember this: This is an example of what we can do when we stop 
talking and start acting and when we reach across the lines that divide 
us and join hands and agree on things that we all agree on. We do not 
have to put up with unacceptable rates of crime and violence. We do not 
have to put up with what I have seen in America.
    We're almost to Halloween now. Just a couple of years ago in 
Baltimore--where the mayor has labored mightily on this--there was this 
wonderful young man, 17 years old, his whole life before him, took two 
little kids out trick-or-treating so they would be safe. And somebody 
shot him from across the street and ended his life just for kicks. Last 
year in Washington, in a suburb, a 13-year-old honor student standing 
innocently at a school bus stop--a city bus stop, shot down just because 
he happened to be standing in the wrong place in a drive-by shooting. 
You don't have to put up with that. You don't have to give up your 
children to that. You don't have to do that. We can make a difference.
    We are making a difference, and you're making a difference here. And 
I will do my best for 4 more years to make sure we have 4 more years of 
declining crime here in Jefferson Parish.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:33 p.m. at the Marrero Action Playground. 
In his remarks, he referred to Yvonne McPherson, who introduced the 
President. A tape was not available for verification of the content of 
these remarks.