NY Mayor Bloomberg seeks fingerprinting for public housing, outrage follows
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that access to public housing buildings should be controlled by fingerprint technology to prevent criminals from entering the buildings.
Speaking during a weekly program on WOR-AM radio, Bloomberg said that fingerprinting tenants of the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA, buildings would help to bring down the crime rate.
“Five percent of our population lives in NYCHA housing, 20 percent of the crime is in NYCHA housing — numbers like that. And we’ve just got to find some way to keep bringing crime down there,” Bloomberg said. “What we really should have is fingerprinting to get in,” he added.
He said that fingerprinting more than 600,000 residents in the city-run housing projects would make the buildings safer. He added that the locks in the apartments are often broken, making it unsafe to live there.
“The people that live there, most of them, want more police protection,” Bloomberg reportedly said. “They want more people. If you have strangers walking in the halls of your apartment building, don’t you want somebody to stop and say, ‘who are you, why are you here?’”
“That’s like invading someone’s privacy or something. Why you want to fingerprint somebody? It is bad enough you get arrested, you get finger printed, so why you want to fingerprint us? Now Bloomberg needs to get a job. Get out of here already. He’s done. Bloomberg is done,” Chelsea Houses resident Nino Alayon said is the local CBS affiliate.
Bill de Blasio, Democratic front-runner in the mayoral race, demanded an apology from the mayor.
“Once again, Mayor Bloomberg has resorted to presuming innocent people are guilty simply because they happen to live in certain areas, and in doing so he is stigmatizing entire communities,” he said.
