Bloomberg pushing the fingerprinting of NYCHA residents

From CBS New York:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest crime-fighting idea had a lot of people riled up on Friday.

The mayor wants to fingerprint more than 600,000 people who live in public housing. He said it would be done to make the projects safer.

Bloomberg was responding to questions about Federal Judge Shira Schendlin’s ruling on the stop-and-frisk program when the topic shifted to security and the New York City Housing Authority. Bloomberg said there has to be a way to make the projects safer.

“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. And we have a whole group of police officers assigned to NYCHA housing,” Bloomberg said. “The people that live there, most of them, want more police protection. 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?’”

Needless to say, there was a lot of finger-pointing at Mayor Bloomberg on Friday. The notion of fingerprinting 620,000 people in public housing — even with the best of intentions of making buildings safer — caught a lot of New York City residents off guard.

“What we really should have is fingerprinting to get in, since there’s an allegation that some of the apartments aren’t occupied by the people who originally have the lease,” Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show.

I guess he means like this guy. There's also Bloomberg's plan for market rate housing between the projects.