Remarks at the Pennsylvania State University Graduate School Commencement in State College, Pennsylvania

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 20, 1996

This can be done. But I have to tell you, there's a big hurdle up the road, and it can't be solved without more citizen help. Because in spite of the fact that the crime rate has dropped for 3 years in a row, the violent crime rate by people under 18 is still going up. And any of you who are in education know that there is a huge group of young people under 18, now coming into grade school, coming up through our system of education, a higher percentage of them than any previous generation, horn out of wedlock, born without the guidance of two parents, born into difficult family situations, out there having to raise themselves.

So even if you have a Ph.D., you've got to care about these kids. They're your kids. They're coming home to your roost, and they will affect your country and your children's future and what kind of America we live in. And we cannot solve the problem of rising crime among young people, even with our antidrug strategy, even with our antigang strategy, even with 100,000 more police, unless there are citizens who are willing to step into the gap in those children's lives to teach them right from wrong, to give them a good future to look forward to, to give them the character and values to walk into that future, to make it possible for them to imagine that one day they might get a degree from a place like Penn State. You have to be willing to do that wherever you live.

I will just give you one simple example. There are 20,000 neighborhood crime watch groups in America - 20,000. If 50 people join each one of these groups we would have a citizen force of a million new community activists to work with those 100,000 police officers, not just to catch criminals but to keep kids away from crime. Fifty people in every group, a million Americans reaching out to children, stopping crimes, catching criminals. If that happened - and no Government program can make it happen - if that happened in community after community after community in the United States, people would be surprised when they heard at night a news report of a serious crime. And America would be a better place. We'd be a lot closer to our shared vision of America in the 21st century.

And that brings me to the last point I wish to make. We have a lot of challenges as a people to rebuild the strength of our communities and our national community. We're still too divided over racial matters. We're still too divided over religious disputes. We still have other problems that are simply unmet that can't be met by Government. Helping children on welfare to move off of welfare, helping communities to reduce the crime rate, these are not the only areas in which we desperately need more citizen involvement to make America the place it ought to be.

Those of you who have college degrees, those of you who may earn a great deal of money will still find that in too many ways where you live the bonds of community have been weakened. There are too many places where people are working harder, moving more often, spending less time with each other and more time exhausted in front of the television. Even prosperous, happy neighborhoods often find that not everybody knows their neighbors.