Unveils $1-Billion Anti-Crime Package : Bush Vows Harsher Penalties for Gun Violence

President Bush on Monday announced a long-anticipated package of measures to combat violent crime, sidestepping the controversial issue of gun control but pledging to increase penalties for gun-related violence and to spend $1 billion on more prosecutors and prisons.

“We’re prepared to match rhetoric with resources,” Bush said, but he did not say where the resources are to come from without worsening the federal deficit. Nor does the Administration have a detailed plan yet for how to use the extra money if it can be obtained, officials conceded.

On guns, Bush rejected the advice of drug policy chief William J. Bennett and others who had proposed broad new restrictions on semiautomatic assault guns, which have become the guns of choice for many drug gang members and street criminals. Rather than limit the guns, Bush proposed to control the clips that hold their ammunition--banning the sale or manufacture of magazines that hold more than 15 rounds.

Law Governing Imports

Bush pledged to enforce the current law that bans the importation of guns deemed unsuitable for sport, a subject under study by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. But he rejected the idea of applying the same test to domestically produced weapons.

Limiting domestically produced weapons would have required the Administration to confront the powerful National Rifle Assn. in a battle over new legislation. Foreign-made weapons can be handled under existing law.

Bush’s package also contains a series of criminal justice measures long sought by conservatives, including a widening of the federal death penalty, which has not been used in a generation, and new restrictions on the so-called exclusionary rule, which bars prosecutors from using illegally seized evidence in criminal cases. Nearly all of the ideas in that portion of the package have been proposed--and defeated--in Congress several times.

Bush’s plan drew mixed reactions. Gun control advocates expressed disappointment that he had not gone further, and several members of Congress questioned how Bush planned to fit his new proposal into the budget.

White House aides have been anticipating Bush’s crime package, which has been under internal debate since March, as the biggest domestic policy initiative of the spring. The unveiling of the proposals was repeatedly delayed as Bush advisers thrashed out the details and sought an appropriate symbolic backdrop. In the end, they chose a Capitol Hill memorial for slain law enforcement officers to serve as Bush’s forum.

Standing in a slow drizzle on the steps of the Capitol and surrounded by uniformed police, Bush called for a “common-sense approach to crime” and pledged that the federal government would “lead the way” to “take back the streets by taking criminals off the streets.”

As Bush spoke, teams of federal marshals fanned out across the capital in the first of a series of eviction raids designed to target Washington apartments used as crack houses. The federal marshals, who perform the function of county sheriff in Washington, had spent several weeks developing the new operation, comparing routine housing violation lists with police intelligence about crack houses so they could target their eviction efforts to disrupt drug trafficking.

Outside Washington, however, the federal role in crime fighting is far more limited, a problem Bush inadvertently highlighted when he cited two particularly notorious crimes in his speech. “Whether it’s the brutalization of a young runner in a park or terrorizing a young man onto a crowded highway,” Bush said, criminal acts “cannot be excused or explained away.”

The two crimes Bush was describing, the recent gang-rape of a young woman jogger in New York’s Central Park and the death of a black man who was chased into the path of a car by white thugs in New York’s Howard Beach neighborhood, were prosecuted in state, not federal, courts. Neither crime would have been affected by Bush’s proposals.

10-Year Mandatory Sentence

Bush’s plan would increase penalties for many federal offenses involving guns, including a new 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for violent crimes committed using a semiautomatic weapon. Those penalties would not apply, however, in state courts, where most violent crimes are handled.

Those Bush initiatives that would have the most visible impact--building new prisons and hiring more federal prosecutors and enforcement agents--may be severely constrained by another of Bush’s priorities, cutting the deficit.

A senior White House official, speaking to reporters Monday on condition that he not be named, said the $1.2-billion cost of the new personnel and prison construction could be accommodated by the budget agreement reached earlier this year. That agreement allowed domestic spending to increase $3.6 billion over current levels.

That $3.6 billion, however, already has been committed to several other programs, including other Administration initiatives such as education and drug fighting, congressional budget officials said. If Bush is to get his extra money for crime without worsening the deficit, “something else will have to be cut,” a senior House budget staff member said.

Criminal-justice experts agree, however, that new prisons will be a necessity if the Administration is serious about crime fighting. “Without increased prison space, if you sentence a lot more people, you would simply have to release a lot of others,” said Philip B. Heymann, a Harvard Law School professor who headed the Justice Department’s criminal division in the Jimmy Carter Administration.

“The question,” Heymann said, “is whether they have something intelligent in mind to do with the increased resources.”

The Administration does not have anything specific in mind yet. Bush plans to ask the Justice and Treasury departments to draw up a plan for using the new resources to target career criminals, particularly those who repeatedly violate federal firearms laws, aides said. But White House officials were so intent on keeping details of the package from leaking out early that many law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the Marshals Service, were not consulted before it was drawn up, officials said.

Staff writers Ronald J. Ostrow and Douglas Jehl contributed to this story.