Clinton Accents Federal Role in Fighting Crime

One day after declaring that the era of big government is over, President Clinton traveled here Wednesday to argue that a scaled-back federal government can still be effective in helping local communities combat violent crime.

The fight against crime was just one of many themes in Clinton’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, but it was the centerpiece of his schedule Wednesday. Surrounded by local police and elected officials, Clinton offered his administration as a friend to both--putting special emphasis on the grants that the 1994 anti-crime measure provided for hiring more police officers.

“This, in my opinion, is the way the federal government ought to relate to American citizens,” Clinton said. “We put up the money, and we say this money is for police and you have to put up some. . . . And then we don’t tell anybody how to train the police, we don’t tell them how to deploy, we don’t tell them how to relate to the community. That’s all things that have to be decided here at the local level.”

Like other presidents, Clinton travels on the day after the State of the Union speech as a way of reinforcing points made the night before.

Clinton won this conservative-leaning border state’s eight electoral votes in 1992. Political aides, while acknowledging that he has lost some ground, argue that a repeat of that performance is still possible this year. Louisville, a city of about 270,000 people, was chosen because it has launched an extensive “community policing” program that is using a $1.2-million grant provided by the Justice Department last year. That allowed the city to add 16 new officers to its existing force of about 670.

The city’s murder rate dropped 16.7% last year, a trend that has been mirrored in New York, Washington and other cities nationally.

Clinton said community policing works not so much because it is more effective in catching criminals but because it deters crime in the first place.

“We will never be able to jail our way out of this crisis,” Clinton said. “If people hurt other people and they’re serious threats to society, they ought to be put in jail for a long time. But we cannot solve the crime problem by making prison guards the fastest-growing employment category in the United States of America.”