Lyndon B. Johnson photo

Remarks in Kansas City, Missouri, at the Meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

September 14, 1967

President Morris, Mayor Davis, Chief Lawrence, Mr. Tamm, Chief Kelley, ladies and gentlemen:

There is an old story about President Calvin Coolidge and his response to the question, "What do you think about sin?"

As you may remember, President Coolidge is supposed to have answered, "I'm against it."

Most Americans would say the same thing today about poverty, disease, and ignorance-and crime.

So I don't expect special credit this morning for coming before the International Association of Chiefs of Police to talk about crime and only say, "I'm against it."

It would not enlighten your discussions nor contribute to public understanding if I were to spend my time here in a long lament about the evil consequences of crime. I think they are as self-evident as they are real.

Neither am I going to be content to just preach about the decline in morality in America.

In the first place, I just do not believe that morality is declining. The responsibility that this Nation has shown, in meeting its human obligations at home and abroad, convinces me that America is a Nation that is strong today.

In the second place, I do not believe that sweeping indictments of our Nation's morality will help us get at the solution of the real problems that affect morality-the problems of poverty, the problems of disease, the problems of ignorance, or of international aggression, or of crime. Self-righteous indignation is not a policy. It is a substitute for a policy.

What America needs is not more handwringing about crime in the streets. What America needs is a policy for action against crime in the streets--and for all the people of this country to support that policy.

And so, believing that as I strongly do, I established in March 1965 the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. I instructed and charged this Commission to deal with the following questions:

--How can law enforcement be organized to meet present needs?

--What steps can be taken to insure protection of individual rights?

--Through what kinds of programs can the Federal Government--of which I am a part--be most effective in assisting and supplementing, not supplanting, State and local law enforcement?

I asked the members that I carefully selected from throughout the Nation to consider the problem of making our streets and our homes and our places of business safer-and to inquire into the special problems of juvenile crime, to examine the administration of justice in the lower courts--to explore the means by which organized crime can be arrested by Federal and local authorities closely coordinating and cooperating together.

The Commission's report, rendered last winter, is a study of crime and a study of criminals. But it is much more than that. It is a systematic analysis of the strengths--as well as the weaknesses--in our American law enforcement. It is a prescription for action--action--action at every level of government, and it is a constructive guide for thoughtful citizens throughout this land in every walk of life.

Acting on its report, I urged the Congress this year to promptly act--promptly act-upon the most comprehensive Federal legislation that has ever been devised to help local authorities meet the problem of crime at the local level in their cities.

That legislation was called the Safe Streets and Crime Control Act. It was based on the five fundamental principles of the Crime Commission's report:

--First, that crime prevention is of paramount importance.

--Second, that the system of justice must itself be just. The system of justice must itself be just and it must have the respect as well as the cooperation of all of its citizens.

--Third, better trained, better paid, and better equipped people are desperately needed throughout the land.

--Fourth, police and correctional agencies must have better information and deeper and broader research into the causes, and into the prevention and control of crime.

--Fifth, and last, substantially greater resources such as more judges and prosecutors, and faster court action, more and better court personnel, more modern court administration--thus modernizing, improving, and bringing the entire criminal justice system up to date in the 20th century.

I did not propose that the Federal Government take over the job of dealing with crime in American streets because from the birth of the Republic to the present moment responsibility for keeping the peace in our cities has been squarely on the shoulders of local authorities.

Respect for law and order begins at home. Children must learn it and must be taught it from their parents. Your children learn it from you--and by what you do and by the example you set. That means that every time we water the lawn when there is an ordinance against it at a certain time of day, the children learn the wrong lesson about respect for law and order--if we water the grass at the wrong time.

That means that every time a parent writes a note to the teacher to excuse Mary's or Johnny's absence from school when they really don't need to be excused and are not sick, they, the children, learn from the parents the wrong lesson about respect for law and respect for order.

The crimes that have most disturbed our people--homicide, robbery, physical assault, burglary, automobile theft, and driving while intoxicated--are crimes against local and State law.

Those laws are made by the city councils and made by the State legislatures. They must be enforced by the police and the State patrol. Their perpetrators are tried in local courts, by local citizens. They are sentenced locally. They are prosecuted locally by judges--by prosecutors who are selected by local people and by judges who are selected by local people.

They are returned to local communities when their sentence has been served--their penalty paid. And these local communities look upon their record and they are under the supervision of local authorities.

Unlike most other countries, America has no national police force. And it desires none. Our Founding Fathers were very careful to see that none was provided for. Why, today in this country our largest city has more police officers than the entire United States Government--one city has more police officers than the entire Government of the United States of America.

Officials in Washington just cannot patrol a neighborhood in the Far West, or stop a burglary in the South, or prevent a riot in a great metropolis.

In the end, then, the quality of the local police, the action of the local prosecutor, the local grand juries, the fairness and the justice of the local courts, the effectiveness of the local correctional systems--all of this responsibility is lodged appropriately and properly in the hands of local authorities--of local citizens.

They at the local level must decide how good they want their law enforcement in their cities to be.

They must determine whether it is right-whether it is just and whether it is fair-to ask a man to risk his life to protect their life for a salary that is lower than they pay another man for working behind a desk or standing on the assembly line in an industrial plant.

They must determine at the local level whether they want a court system that they select and provide for which delays justice until justice is denied.

They must determine locally whether they want a correctional system that deals with youthful offenders, not as lives to be redeemed, but as people who are doomed to clash repeatedly with the law.

If they decide that they want something better for their communities than what they are getting today, then we think that if they make this decision--and they can make it today through their Congressmen and their Senators supporting the recommendations the President has made--some of which have been before the Congress many years--then their National Government can, should, and will help them get it--not by taking over the system of law enforcement, but by helping them strengthen and reform it.

That is what the Safe Streets Act that I recommended to the Congress would do. If its spirit and if its purpose survive, it will provide grants to those cities and to those States who not only increase their present commitment to criminal justice, but who are willing to go out and develop programs for:

--better training,

--better use of their personnel,

--higher standards and for innovations such as tactical squads and community relations units, and

--new techniques of rehabilitation.

It will help pay the salaries of those who operate these programs. It will help pay the salaries up to one-third of the grant which could be used to increase the pay of policemen and other criminal justice personnel working with them.

The key to this program is experiment and innovation--and better use of the most advanced knowledge that we have gained in this country of crime, its treatment, and its causes. In my opinion, every law enforcement official in this country ought to welcome it in the spirit in which it is offered: as a practical and imaginative tool for helping our law enforcement officers cope with crime in the cities without in any way--in any way--diminishing either their responsibility or their authority.

Now to a matter that affects you and affects you much more than most of the citizens, but in the end it will affect every single one of us--it will reach into every home in this land--and that is the gun sale law. A law to limit--a law to safeguard--the sale of guns has been before our Congress for several years.

Its passage would plug up one more big loophole to save your life, and mine, or the life of some innocent child down the street. And I hope it will pass.

Its purpose is simple--it is to keep lethal weapons out of the wrong hands--out of the hands of dangerous criminals, out of the hands of drug addicts, out of the hands of mentally ill people who really know not what they do.

Its basic aim is to limit the out-of-State purchases and the interstate mail-order sale of firearms. We believe this is the most effective way that the Federal Government has of protecting your safety and the safety of your children from criminals, drug addicts, and the mentally ill.

If we want to curb crime--if we want to arrest crime--if we want to restrain criminals-here is an action that we can take that will be a long step forward.

Let us not be content to bewail the rising crime rate or to talk about the statistics of the numbers of repeaters who fill our jails and prisons while we turn our backs and ignore the fact that they can go to any mail order house and get a weapon to shoot your wife after they tear the door down at midnight.

Let us act instead of talk against crime. Let us repair as many shattered lives as we can. Let us do it within and through the American system of due process and in keeping with our tenacious regard at all times for the blessings of individual freedom.

You, and the men that you command, are America's frontline in the fight against crime. You endanger your lives every day just as the man does in the rice paddies of Vietnam to protect freedom, to protect liberty, to protect your country.

This summer, some of you experienced a new kind of disorder in your cities. You faced, not individual acts of violence or just thievery, but you faced massive crimes against people and against property.

Much can explain--but nothing can justify--the riots of 1967.

They damaged a great deal more than the storefronts and the American homes. They damaged the respect and the accommodation among men on which a civilized society ultimately depends, and without which there can be no progress toward social justice.

The violence of this summer raised up a new and serious threat to local law enforcement. It spawned a group of men whose interest lay in provoking--in provoking-others to destruction, while they fled its consequences.

These wretched, vulgar men, these poisonous propagandists, posed as spokesmen for the underprivileged and capitalized on the real grievances of suffering people.

And the vast majority of those people"the vast majority of them--believe that obedience to the law, in Abraham Lincoln's phrase, must be our religion here in America.

They have seen the law change. They have seen it become more just as the years passed in our times. They have seen their fights more firmly established, their opportunities sharply increased in the last decade.

They know that the law in a democratic society is their refuge, and that lawless violence is a trap for all those who engage in it.

We must redeem their faith in law. We must make certain that law enforcement is fair and effective--that protection is afforded every family, no matter where they live--that justice is swift and justice is blind to religion, color, status, and favoritism.

We cannot tolerate behavior that destroys what generations of men and women have built here in America--no matter what stimulates that behavior, and no matter what is offered to try to justify it.

Neither can we abide a double standard of justice, based on the color of a man's skin or the accent of a man's speech.

Those who wear the police officer's badge-those who sit in judgment in the courts-those who prosecute in the chambers--those who manage our correctional institutions-all of these have a very special responsibility for the maintenance of order and the achievement of justice throughout this land.

But every single one of us--private citizen and government official--shares some in that responsibility.

We can all say very easily, "We are against crime"--and then we can let it go at that. We can preach sermons, we can write editorials, we can make speeches, and we can get our pictures made talking about crime and immoral behavior--and we can think that we have done our duty.

Or we can respect--we can encourage-all of our citizenry to respect the law and to respect those who protect us in the name of the law.

We can be willing to pay the bill for improving the performance of our police, our courts, and our correctional institutions, and give them the salary, pay, and equipment that they need. We can insist on devoting enough of our resources and enough of our brainpower to meet the problem of crime--to make America safer and more just for all its citizens.

I have always felt that we could make great strides forward if we would only realize that the nurse and the medical attendant who in the middle of the night may determine whether we live or die when we need attention-that they have better training, better pay, and better inducements; that the teacher who prepares our children, sets an example for them, and infuses knowledge into them--that they should be among our best trained, our best prepared, and our best rewarded.

And that the policeman and the sheriff who protect the lives of our wives, children, families, and ourselves should be among the best equipped, best trained, and the best paid people in the land.

We cannot get those things just with rhetoric and conversation, picture-taking and television film. We have to pay for it. We have to desire it. We have to be willing to sacrifice in order to get it.

That is going to take a lot more than just talking "against" crime. That is going to take, among other things, being for action.

I would hope that we could all be for the Congress taking action to make our streets safer--and taking action that will better promote civil peace--that we can take action for better schools and better playgrounds, for more and better support of our churches and our spiritual leaders--for better housing and better homes, for better living of all our people--which in the end will give us better citizens and a better and stronger Nation.

It will make us all a happier and more guilt-free people.

I am sorry that I could not be with you the early part of your convention. I did very much, though, want to come here and talk to you--and to salute you before you returned to your respective homes and again assumed command of this most responsible service that you are rendering and performing this great duty that is yours.

We look to you to protect our families, our homes, and our lives. You have a right to look to your public servants, your political leaders, to see that your efforts are not forgotten, are not ignored, are not put at the bottom of the priority list.

I thought this morning by coming out here and visiting with you and telling you some of the things that were in the heart and the head of your President, that perhaps we could awaken this Nation to a responsibility that we are not assuming--to an obligation that we are not discharging--to a job that the President and the Congress, the legislators, and the city councils must face up to.

I am ready to get on with my part of it.

Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 11:40 a.m. at the Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Mo. In his opening words he referred to William H. Morris, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Ilus W. Davis, Mayor of Kansas City, Leonard G. Lawrence, first vice president of the Association, Quinn Tamre, executive director of the Association, and Clarence M. Kelley, Chief of Police of Kansas City.

The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 was approved by the President on June 19, 1968 (Public Law 90-351, 82 Stat. 197).

Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks in Kansas City, Missouri, at the Meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/237772

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