Clinton circumvents gun issue in plan to cut city homicide rates

Proposes spending $4b a year, hiring 100,000 officers

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton greeted supporters in Philadelphia yesterday and announced a proposal to reduce homicide rates in cities. (William Thomas Cain/Getty Images)

PHILADELPHIA - Hillary Clinton yesterday declared a goal of cutting the nation's big-city homicide rate in half, addressing an issue that has dominated local politics but skirting the one thing that local officials see as a consensus solution: new gun restrictions.

"We've got to get back to doing what works," Clinton said in a speech at a YMCA in a working-class black neighborhood of West Philadelphia, where she announced a $4 billion-a-year plan that includes helping municipalities hire 100,000 new police officers, reprising her husband's community policing program. "I'm old-fashioned like that."

Clinton was traipsing delicately through the complex politics of guns in Pennsylvania and nearby Appalachian states that will vote in coming weeks. Her announcement marked a turn toward urban issues that have gone largely unaddressed in the primary campaign, but in a way that appeared unlikely to compromise Clinton's appeal among rural white voters who have been a key part of her coalition here and in previous contests.

"She's being respectful of what's really her base," said Ken Lawrence, a Pennsylvania Democratic consultant who is neutral in the presidential campaign. "But I don't know how you talk about homicide in Philadelphia without talking about guns."

Clinton talked about gangs and drugs as a cause of homicides, but mentioned guns only in passing. She noted "a direct correlation between the illegal gun sales and homicides," as she proposed a new initiative to crack down on interstate gun trafficking and allow federal agencies to share information on the transfer of guns. In addition, Clinton said she would work to renew the assault-weapons ban, signed by President Clinton in 1994 but allowed to lapse a decade later.

Clinton - who has described learning to shoot a gun as a girl visiting Northeastern Pennsylvania - defined crime as broadly as possible, with a localized problem for everyone: meth in rural communities, online crimes in the suburbs, and white-collar crimes on Wall Street.

"People are being victimized in so many ways in America today," Clinton said.

Philadelphia's rising homicide rate - 292 killings last year, the highest in a decade - has been a dominant concern in city politics, including during last year's mayoral campaign. Democratic candidates who had never focused on crime issues reinvented themselves as law-and-order types committed to aggressively enforcing existing gun laws and fighting for the city's right to implement new ones.

One of them, Michael Nutter, is the city's new mayor and a Clinton supporter who introduced her yesterday.

Thursday, he hosted a high-profile City Hall photo opportunity - complete with a table of confiscated guns - to sign five new gun ordinances designed to provoke a court fight over the city's ability to regulate guns on its own.

Nutter likened his defiant gesture to those that earned the country's independence and ended slavery.

Philadelphia-area politicians have found little success in past gun-control efforts: Hunting is central to Pennsylvania's culture - in much of the state, schools close for the first day of deer season - and legislators of both parties have typically resisted any efforts to rewrite the state laws that regulate guns.

Similar attitudes toward guns reign among Democratic constituencies in upcoming contests in West Virginia and Kentucky, and in the frontier states of Montana and South Dakota.

Clinton's anticrime agenda also calls for eliminating the federal mandatory five-year sentence for crack cocaine users and for expanding programs to help ex-convicts and treat drug addicts.

Besides the 100,000 new police officers to focus on high-crime areas, she proposed spending $250 million a year on prosecutors who would also focus on specific neighborhoods.

Bill Clinton launched both programs while president, but the Bush administration eliminated or cut them.

Sasha Issenberg can be reached at sissenberg@globe.com.