Louise Slaughter: “I am sure everybody is confused. They have to be. Who is the best crime fighter in America today? None of us know. But…”

“I am sure everybody is confused. They have to be. Who is the best crime fighter in America today? None of us know. But there are a couple things that I know from experience that I had in chairing a public safety committee in the county legislature. One of the things that happened when the pressure really got on the local budgets, they cut back on the police force and decided to patrol neighborhoods in police cars with windows up driving down the streets. We know that that has not worked. And one of the things that the crime bill that we passed here last year is trying to do is to readdress that. There is one way to fight crime. It requires the people who live in the neighborhood to be involved. It requires that there be police in the neighborhood, on the street, in their shops, a policeman that they know, a person they go to, someone who pays attention, looks after heir children, the kind of community policing we used to do in this country. If we revert all the money and put it into prisons, it is not going to make us one wit safer on the street. We have been in an absolute orgy of jail and prison building which has not helped. Someone has got to be on the street to police it, to prevent the crime and to catch the perpetrators. I hope that we will maintain the 100,000 policemen on the street.”