NY Mayor Bloomberg takes heat for public housing remark

Melanie Eversley | USA TODAY

Some civil rights advocates are reeling after New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on a radio show Friday morning that public housing residents should be fingerprinted.

The mayor said on WOR Radio that making such a move would help curb crime in the city's housing projects. He also said locks at many of the city's public housing residences are broken and this allows anyone to come and go.

"What we really should have is fingerprinting to get in," Bloomberg said during a weekly discussion with the station's John Gambling. "We've just got to find some ways to keep bringing down crime there."

The comments come days after the mayor vowed to appeal a judge's decision to order a review of the city's stop-and-frisk policy -- a measure heavily pushed by Bloomberg that gives law enforcement wide latitude in stopping people it deems suspicious. Civil rights advocates have complained that minority men are unfairly targeted by the policy and the issue has pitted Bloomberg against major organizations such as the NAACP.

During the radio show, Bloomberg said that residents of the New York City Housing Authority make up about 5% of the city's population but that the complexes account for about 20% of the city's crime.

"Mayor Bloomberg's derogatory statements about public housing residents are an outrage," Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in a statement.

The organize operates separately from the NAACP.

"Families live in public housing apartments, not criminals," Ifill said. "Public housing residents, as well as their friends and family members visiting them, deserve the same level of respect from our mayor as any other New York City resident. They should not be treated like prisoners in their own homes."

Darius Charney, senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, told CBS New York that Bloomberg's comments were excessive and that an easier fix for the crime issue would be to repair the locks at public housing complexes.

"My understanding, having talked to a lot of tenants, is that's a very big problem," Charney told the news organization. "You have broken doors, which anybody can open and close."

A spokesman for Bloomberg defended the mayor's remarks, saying fingerprinting is the next new realm of modern-day security.

"All security is moving toward biometrics - even the next iPhone will have fingerprint security," the spokesman, Marc La Vorgna, told Politicker.com."Every day the mayor logs into his own computer by placing his finger on the keyboard to log in. Why wouldn't we want to think about providing the highest level of security possible for NYCHA residents?"