Clinton Pushes Crime Bill in Chicago Tour : Legislation: He underscores the need for action during a visit to a violent housing project. His measure remains bogged down in Congress.

President Clinton traveled to one of the nation’s most violent housing projects Friday as he sought to generate support for the Administration’s anti-crime bill, still mired in Congress months after the President had hoped to sign it into law.

Standing in front of a display of automatic weapons seized during controversial sweeps of buildings at the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s south side, Clinton said that “the Congress cannot walk away from this.”

“This is an enormous opportunity,” Clinton said. “This will be the most major piece of anti-crime legislation ever passed by the United States Congress, beyond question. It must pass and it ought to pass.”

The House and Senate have approved differing versions of the measure and legislators have been trying to reconcile the two. Both versions would ban 19 specific types of assault weapons, including many that Clinton saw during a quick tour led by Chicago Housing Authority police Sgt. Rogelio Watson.

One of the weapons, Watson said, pointing to his own chest, “has the capacity to penetrate this body armor, through the rear exit, and maybe, if two other people are standing behind me, it’ll go right on through” them as well.

The Robert Taylor Homes, a vast collection of high-rise buildings south of this city’s downtown, are among the most crime-ridden and violent housing projects in the nation. Indeed, when White House advance staff members arrived here to plan Clinton’s trip, telephone company officials said that they would not go into the project to install the usual White House telephone lines without a police escort, White House officials said.

Clinton used the visit to deliver a homily on the need to combine America’s traditional concern for individual rights with an emphasis on community responsibilities.

“We cannot survive as a people if our children cannot grow up safe and free from fear in good schools, on safe streets, doing wholesome, constructive things,” Clinton told an enthusiastic audience of residents gathered on a basketball court.

“We talk a lot in this country about our rights and our rights as Americans are the most important thing to us,” he added. “But the thing that makes our rights work is the right of the community to exist and the responsibilities of citizens to help them exist.

“Deep inside the spirit of you, all of you who live here, is the overwhelming desire not only to exercise your rights but to see this community be full of responsible citizens, to make the community work again.”

Clinton also touted major provisions of the crime bill, including the funds it would provide for 100,000 new police officers across the nation. It also contains additional money for crime prevention programs, including drug treatment centers, youth basketball leagues and other recreation programs.

Conservative Republicans have opposed much of the new prevention money, arguing that it is merely a disguised way to increase spending on urban social programs. But Clinton argued that the funds are important because they “will really give young people a chance to say ‘yes’ to something and not just to say ‘no’ to something.”

Clinton sidestepped the most contentious item in the current congressional debate--a fight over the so-called Racial Justice Act, a provision passed by the House that would allow defendants to challenge death penalties by using statistical evidence showing racial disparities in the way it is applied.

Opponents of the provision, including a majority of the Senate, have argued that it effectively would end the death penalty in most states.

Asked about the controversy, Clinton said only that he wanted to “give the conferees a chance to work through it.”

Both in remarks to reporters after his tour and in his speech, Clinton strongly endorsed another controversial idea--police sweeps designed to locate weapons in apartments in the project. Earlier this year, a federal court banned the sweeps, saying that they violated residents’ constitutional rights. The Chicago Housing Authority, with Clinton’s backing, then introduced a modified sweeps policy that is also being challenged in the courts.

Later in the day, the President opened the World Cup soccer tournament before 60,000 fans at Soldier Field. Sporting a colorful World Cup tie, he called love of the game “a universal language.”