Bill Clinton: “Let me tell you, first of all, I'd like for you to have a chance to say maybe to me and to all these people what you…”

“Let me tell you, first of all, I'd like for you to have a chance to say maybe to me and to all these people what you think ought to be done. But let me begin by responding to your specific question. He is coming to see--Dr. Brown is, Lee Brown, who is the Di- rector of Drug Policy for our country, the drug czar. He was formerly the police chief in New York, in Atlanta, and in Houston. He started a community policing program in New York. And believe it or not, New York City now, for 2 years in a row, according to the FBI statistics has had a decline in their crime rate in all seven major areas of crime. So the first thing we've got to try to do is to make the police and the community work together better, with the proper allocation of resources with a view toward preventing crime from occurring as well as catching criminals quicker. That's why we need more police officers so cities can afford to deploy the resources that way. The second thing we've got to do, I'll say again, is to try to take the guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them. The third thing we're trying to do, as Dr. Brown will tell you, is we want to change the emphasis of the Federal Government's drug control efforts. And with regard to enforcement, we want to concentrate more on kingpins, really big dealers, to try to break the financial back of a lot of these networks, not just on how many arrests we can make of people in the middle but really go after big people and money networks. Then, with people who are actual users and who may commit crimes in the course of that, we're trying to have much more comprehensive alcohol and drug abuse treatment. One of the really important things about our health care plan that I would think you would support is that it includes substance abuse treatment for people who now don't have any insurance. So that will stop a lot of these long, long delays for adequate treatment. Drug treatment works in an extraordinary percentage of the cases, not in all the cases but in a lot of the cases, if it is there. So those are that things that we're working on. But the other thing we want to do is to listen to people like you who have actually done things that work. We have not only Lee Brown. Janet Reno, the Attorney General, was a prosecutor in Miami, one of the toughest towns in America for drug problems. And Louis Freeh, the Director of the FBI, was a U.S. attorney, a Federal judge, and an FBI agent, working principally in drug cases. He broke big international drug cases as well as dealing with drugs on the street. So we've got these three crimefighters who basically came up from the grassroots. And it's the first time we ever had a team of grassroots crimefighters dealing with the drug issue. They want to hear from you and people like you all over the country about what would work for you. Mr. Atkinson. Mr. President, while we have you and since you've asked, Mr. Hay does have a couple of suggestions.”