Political Quotes

“last September the President signed the most comprehensive, toughest, smartest crime bill in the history of this institution. It is a crime bill that put better than $10 billion to build new prisons and combined community policing, 100,000 new police officers with prevention programs that work. It has bipartisan support at that time, Republicans and Democrats signing on, Members of the other body, prominent Republicans signing on. It was a bipartisan bill. But, unfortunately for some people in this institution, the President apparently got too much credit for that bill. So now we have a new bill. This bill has a Republican label on it. It attempts to throw all the money from community policing into block grants and hope that county commissioners and school committee members and hope that city councils and local officials somehow become law enforcement professionals and spend the money the right way. Even though we have a history from 1968 where 33 percent of that money went to administrative costs, we are going to tinker and change this crime bill to take away the label of a Democratic bill or a President Clinton bill. Before I got to Congress, I was the first assistant district attorney in Middlesex County. Our office managed 13,000 criminal cases a year. I want to tell my colleagues, fighting crime is serious business. You do not fight crime by taking a political poll. You do not fight crime by listening to a focus group.”