[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 2 (Monday, January 18, 1999)]
[Pages 52-54]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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 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

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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 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,

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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; and Chief Charles E. Samarra and Officer Irma Rivera, 
Alexandria Police Department. The President also referred to the 
Community Oriented Police Services (COPS) program.