Here the details. It was the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act. That's what Bill Clinton did. This is the Act that Clinton used to put a hundred thousand new cops on the street. But that never happened, by the way. We've reviewed this before. The hundred thousand cops program was a PR program. There were some new cops, and what happened was a local community, the federal government would pay the full salary for, say, five new cops for the first year. Then the next year the local community would have to come up with 25% of the salary and after three or four years you'd have to pay the entire salary, whatever, for new cops.
So it was a scam that Clinton ran for great PR. But the reason that this happened was that African-American community leaders were beseeching him to do something because crack cocaine, and other drugs, too, but it was primary crack, were out of control. You know, these minority neighborhoods were already being ravaged just with the cultural decay that was occurring in the country, and you put this on top of it. I mean, the dealers were giving it away, selling it for very little, getting people hooked, and that's all it took.
So a hundred thousand new cops, midnight basketball, there's all kinds of things that Clinton initiated here at the behest of the very people who are out there protesting him now. And all of this, the renewed interest in crime in African-American neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods, minority neighborhoods, not just African-American, the renewed interest traces all the way back to the 1994 violent crime act. It was the largest crime bill in the history of the country, 356 pages, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons.
The Democrats did this, folks! There was $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs, and that's where midnight basketball was. The Democrats demanded all this, and they did it. And so Black Lives Matter are out there like this is a Republican problem because the Republicans are the racists and the bigots. And it's not that at all, and it's all coming home to roost, and Clinton doesn't like it. He doesn't like these people showing up and heckling him, because he knows. And that's why he's reacting the way he is.