

			   THE WHITE HOUSE

		    Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                             April 14, 1994     

	     
		       REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
	  IN EVENT WITH MAYORS AND LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS
	     
	     
			    The South Lawn 



11:35 A.M. EDT


	     THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much.  Thank you.  Please 
be seated.  Thank you very much.
	     
	     Ladies and gentlemen, as some of you may know, early 
this morning, two American helicopters, flying in Northern Iraq as 
part of Operation Provide Comfort to provide humanitarian relief to 
the Kurdish population there, were mistakenly shot down in a tragic 
accident by two United States jet fighters who thought they were 
Iraqi helicopters illegally in the area.
	     
	     This is a terrible tragedy for the families involved and 
for the people in the Armed Forces who have courageously tried to 
protect the Kurds for many years now.  And I would like to ask that, 
since so many of you put your lives on the line every day, we open 
this ceremony with a moment of silent prayer for those who lost their 
lives, their families and their loved ones.

		  
			      * * * * * 
	     
	     
	     THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you.  (Applause.)  Thank you very 
much, Mayor Riordan, Mayor Abramson, Mayor James, Mayor Daley.  
Sergeant Lawson, you gave a great talk today, and you represented 
people in law enforcement very well.  And we thank you especially for 
being here.  (Applause.)
	     
	     To Attorney General Reno and the other federal officials 
who are here; all the distinguished mayors, the leaders of our law 
enforcement organizations, and all of you in law enforcement.  I 
thank those of you on the front lines of fighting the crime problem 
for coming to here to Washington today to urge Congress to pass the 
crime bill now and without delay.  
	     
	     Behind me stand people who represent not only by their 
own courageous deeds, but by the uniforms they wear the heroes of law 
enforcement who stand behind all the rest of us every day.  People 
who wake up every morning, put on a uniform and put their lives on 
the line to protect our safety.  There are nearly 100 of them from 
every state in America.  They do good work.  They can not only catch 
criminals, they can prevent crime.  And that's why we want to put 
another 100,000 like them on our streets over the next five years.  
(Applause.)
	     
	     Last week, I was in communities all across America like 
those represented here today.  The Attorney General was, too.  And 
everywhere people wanted to talk about the crime problem, about the 
violence, about the tearing away of the future of so many children's 
lives.  
	     


	     When you go to Capitol Hill today, tell Congress that 
the people you and I work for have waited long enough.  The people 
don't care about amendments that could slow the process down.  They 
don't want partisan bickering.  They want the bill certainly to be 
reviewed carefully and to be honestly debated.  But this is not a 
problem, as Mayor Riordan so eloquently said, that the American 
people see in terms of partisan advantages.
	     
	     Nearly one-third of all American families -- Democrats, 
Republicans and independents, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian 
Americans, you name it -- all of us, we share a common curse:  In the 
most wonderful country in the world, we have the highest violent 
crime rate, the largest percentage of our people behind bars; cities 
where young people in gangs are often better armed than the police 
forces who are supposed to protect the rest of the citizens.  
We can do better than this, and this crime bill is a very good start.  
Ask Congress simply to give you the tools you need to do your job.
	     
	     The 100,000 new police officers is a five-year goal.  
But I have made it clear to Congress that if they will go ahead and 
pass this bill now, even though it's mid-April, I will cut through 
the bureaucracy and the red tape to make sure that 20,000 of those 
new officers are hired, trained and ready to go to work within the 
first year of this bill.  (Applause.)
	     
	     More police officers on the street, in the 
neighborhoods, relating to the people who live there, properly 
trained and properly deployed, will lower the crime rate.  In Los 
Angeles -- he was too modest to mention this -- but after the 
earthquake, Mayor Riordan and Chief Williams responded to a 
potentially explosive situation by increasing police presence on the 
street, increasing contact with the community, and there was instead 
of an increase in the crime rate, which was perfectly predictable, a 
dramatic decrease in the crime rate.  The Los Angeles Times said it 
helped keep criminals off the street in record numbers.  The people 
of L.A. rose to the occasion because they saw the police in their 
communities, they knew they were not alone, and they knew it was a 
problem that, together, they could deal with.
	     
	     No matter how many more police we put into our 
communities, we also know that we have to do something about the 
relatively small percentage of our criminal population who commit the 
dangerous, violent crimes repeatedly.  This crime bill does tell 
them, three strikes and you're out.  As I have said several times and 
I said with the Attorney General over at the Justice Department a 
couple of days ago, this is a controversial provision of the bill.
But let us not forget that for many violent criminals today, if the 
consequences of their crime are serious enough, they could get a life 
sentence -- one strike and you're out.  
	     
	     But state rules are different from state to state on 
parole eligibility.  And there are many people that we now know are 
highly likely to continue to repeat certain kinds of very serious 
crimes.  There ought to be a provision in our criminal law that 
identifies them and that protects the rest of the population and the 
law enforcement population, and permits us to say to other criminals 
who are not in that category, you have a chance to start your life 
again.  So, is it right to have a three strikes and you're out law?  
I believe it is.  And I think that we're doing the right thing to 
pass it in this bill today.  
	     
	     We also make available funding for 30,000 more prison 
cells so that we don't treat this as some sort of mandate on the 
states.  We are trying to help the states to enact their own kinds of 
sensible punishment laws and bear some of the costs along with them.  
We also provide funding for smarter and less costly punishment for 
nonviolent criminals -- boot camps for juvenile offenders -- and 
significant, even dramatic, increases in drug treatment so that 


people who are going to be paroled have a good chance to make it once 
they go back on the street.
	     
	     I thank you, Sergeant Lawson, for mentioning Lee Brown, 
the Director of our Drug Policy.  Now he worries not only about 
community policing, but about how we can make sure, when we do parole 
people, they're likely to be law-abiding.  And I can tell you, it 
does not make sense, when you look at the percentage of people who 
commit crimes who have a drug or an alcohol abuse problem, it does 
not make any sense to put them back on the street without adequate 
drug treatment.  Finally, this bill does something about that.  And 
the Congress should be urged to pass it for that reason alone, along 
with the other good things in the bill.  (Applause.) 
	     
	     Let me say finally, this bill has a healthy dose of 
prevention.  And we know that works.  And I was glad to see Sergeant 
Lawson speak up for prevention.  It's funny, you know, you hear 
sometimes the debates in the Congress and people who want to be tough 
on crime say, well, this prevention stuff, it's a little squishy and 
maybe we shouldn't spend the money on it.  But if you talk to any 
veteran police officer, they tell you, spend the money on prevention; 
give me the tools to do alcohol and drug abuse education; give me the 
tools to give these kids something to do before school and after 
school and at night; give me the tools to give these young people 
something to say yes to, instead of just having us tell them to say 
no to something wrong.  That's what the law enforcement community 
tells us.
	     
	     So I would ask you as you go to the Hill today, if you 
believe that, as every law enforcement official I've ever spoken with 
does, tell the Congress that prevention is an important part of this. 
	     
	      On Monday at the Justice Department, a young man from 
Boston named Eddie Cutanda stood up and said he used to hate the 
police.  Pretty brave kid.  There were about 500 police officers 
there when he said it.  (Laughter.)  And he said he used to hate the 
police, because he used to run the streets with his friends.  And he 
got away from gangs and drugs, thanks to a community policing 
program, and the kind of after-school activity that the officers were 
able to bring to the young people of Boston -- a prevention program 
that worked, that made this young man and his friends go from hating 
the police to loving the police, and had him standing up in the 
Justice Department with the Attorney General and the President of the 
United States, saying, we are not part of a lost generation; we want 
to have a life and a better future.  (Applause.)
	     
	     There are all kinds of prevention strategies in this 
bill including the opportunity for some of our communities to offer 
larger numbers of jobs to teenagers who are today out of work, just 
to test to see whether that will lower the crime rate dramatically.  
We will be able to experiment with a lot of different things as well, 
as building on what works in community after community.
	     
	     You know, I ran for this job and moved to Washington 
because I wanted to help empower people back home all over America to 
solve their own problems.  That's what this crime bill does.  And 
another thing I am proud of is, we do it without new taxes even 
though, as Mayor James said, it is by far the biggest federal 
investment, and Mayor Abramson emphasized, by far the biggest federal 
investment in anticrime activities in the history of this country.
	     
	     We do it by taking a major portion of the Vice 
President's reinventing government plan -- a plan to reduce the 
federal bureaucracy by 250,000 employees over the next five years and 
put all the savings into a trust fund directed to fund the crime 
bill.  That's a pretty good swap -- reduce the federal government by 
250,000 by attrition, by early retirement, with discipline over the 
next five years, and give all the money from the savings back to 
local communities to make our streets, our homes and our schools 
safer.  (Applause.)


	     
	     Again, let me thank you all for coming here.  Let me 
remind you that this is not a partisan issue or a sectional issue or 
a racial issue or an income issue.  If anything should unite our 
country, if anything should truly make us a United States of America 
in 1994, it should be the passionate desire to restore real freedom 
to our streets, to give our families back their security, to give our 
children back their future.  
	     
	     I thank all of you for what you have done to secure it.  
I look forward now to honoring these fine policemen and women behind 
me, and I urge you, take this opportunity to make it abundantly clear 
to the United States Congress that America should not wait another 
day, another week for a crime bill that will achieve these 
objectives.  We need it and you can deliver it.
	     
	     Thank you and God bless you all.  

				 END12:03 P.M. EDT

