Submitted by Darren Smith, Guest Blogger
According to CBS New York, New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg desires to reduce crime among the more than half million residents of the city’s housing districts. He is quoted as saying
“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?’”
According to this proposal, keeping crime down would be successfully addressed by requiring all residents to submit to fingerprinting as a condition of residency. Supposedly, the fingerprint or other biometric data would be used for biometric access devices such as live fingerprint scanning devices mated with door locks. Yet, the centuries old method of using a key seems to work almost as well and so could perhaps an electronic RFID or magnetic stripe card device such as those used in many hotels. Is security the real goal or is it more nuanced?
Approximately 620,000 persons reside in NYC Housing Authority properties. One has to wonder about practicality in fingerprinting this many individuals, especially if a large portion of these residents are young children where fingerprinting is difficult. One could estimate if somehow this was manageable at even three minutes per set it would require. At 248 office days per year and an 8 hour workday it would take over 15 worker years to fingerprint the existing residents, assuming there was no turnover or births or additions or subtractions.
But what will be more startling to many would be the implication to civil liberties and perhaps the insult in the minds of a large percentage of the tenants this would foster. The proffered intent would be that by fingerprinting each of the tenants and merging that with the security system theoretically only those who have prints were on file would be allowed access into the building. But somehow Mayor Bloomberg believes having a fingerprint on file would allow someone in authority or a tenant to be able to see a person who does or does reside there and is walking down the halls, scan their fingerprints using their eyeballs, and then be able to verify that this person is a resident.
But if such a system is implemented, what is to be done with guests of tenants or for those wishing to contact the residents for any lawful purpose? And realistically how easy would it be to defeat this scheme? One nefarious resident simply opens the door and a phalanx of crooks marches in.
Practicalities aside, is it reasonable for those who through economic need reside in government housing blocks must submit to fingerprinting as is the case with those accused of crimes who are booked into jail while those who are of better means who rent or purchase their own residences not required?
But we should also ask, what the true purpose of this is, if there is one. Is it really to screen people or manage who enter the building? Fingerprinting the entire population of NYC is not going to reduce crime by any significant amount. It does have a purpose in identification only. Fingerprints only show who a person is and that they were present at a location to leave a latent print on an object. If one or both of these elements is absent a fingerprint is useless. Yet, the identification potential has the ability to detect who is actually applying to be a resident; that is if their fingerprints are on file. The problem comes in the use of this data.
Some states prohibit children under a certain age from being fingerprinted for a criminal arrest and / or conviction. Would this proposed rule by a means of bypassing this? Some security cleared employment applicants are required to submit a finger print card, such as those in positions of responsibility, investment managers, government agents and the likes. These cards are then compared with a national database to determine identification and if these prints are matched to those latent prints that were taken from crime scenes. Haphazard data entry by negligent employees can lead to incidences where one set of prints might be mismatched to another person, resulting years later possibly in the wrong person being implicated for a crime due a latent print matching the wrong person mistakenly entered into the database. The location for these print cards are also identified, so those who have submitted fingerprints (if these prints are to be merged into the federal databases) by reason of being public housing applicants when a comparison is made for them later in life it can show that the purpose of this person’s fingerprinting was that they had applied for public housing. Would this lead to a discriminatory treatment of the person, or at least an unfavorable view by some people who might hold a prejudice? And do people have a right to simple be not included in a government database when they have not committed any crime and elected not to apply for a security clearance?
But what kind of society requires it’s most financially vulnerable to submit to the same fingerprinting as those booked into jail as a condition to reside in public housing? And, what if the potential resident elects to refuse to submit to these procedures? Do the children of a single parent have to rely on the charity of others, or be homeless because a parent chooses, for whatever reason they have, to not be printed? Are we also to accept that economically disadvantaged people are criminals by nature and therefore are subjected to a different set of rules for different strata of citizens?
Source CBS New York
My only knowledge of this is the above article. Mayor Bloomberg said that 20% of the crime is in public housing. That sounds pretty bad. One’s home is supposed to be where you rest and recuperate from stress. However, you could infer from that statistic that public housing is probably one of the greatest sources of stress in the residents’ lives. That means for them, there’s less mental, emotional and physical wherewithal left over to do all the things you have to do to carry out daily life. Even more so if they become crime victims and the source of their stress is more than just crime avoidance.
My first reaction to this isn’t that it’s criminalization of the poor; rather, it refuses to surrender to the idea that, just because people are poor, they have less desire to live in a crime-free building and neighborhood, or that the government shouldn’t try to help them do so. To live free of violence is a universal human need. I once lived in a poor neighborhood. I feared for my physical safety many times. Why wouldn’t I have been entitled to the government’s public safety efforts just because I didn’t have a lot of money? Should the government have just given me up to the people who would have harmed me?
Bloomberg says: 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.
Crime is primarily caused by existential desperation. If 20% of the crime is in NYCHA housing, that is probably because it is a hot spot for desperation and therefore a source of crime. Reducing crime there will only cause the desperate to look for easier victims elsewhere, it will not reduce the overall crime rate.
Although some crime is committed by sociopaths and psychopaths (atypical psychologies), the typical psychology commits crime because they cannot survive otherwise. Crime rises with economic trouble, and falls during times of prosperity (not to zero, but it falls significantly).
The same goes for drug abuse; drug abuse provides a temporary release from an otherwise bleak and miserable existence in poverty that despite one’s efforts they could not escape. That becomes addictive, and the addicted turn to crime to pay for their escape; because drugs are illegal, this encourages others to deal drugs and make money as their escape from poverty.
The way to reduce crime in NYCHA properties, and throughout the city, is to break the trap of poverty, provide clear ways out and assistance so those forced to live there do not lose hope and get so desperate they feel abandoned by society, and victimized by society, and because of that feel they might as well treat the rest of society as it has treated them: Disposable, expendable, and exploitable.
Having a cop on every street corner is not going to help. Pay anybody in NYCHA that is willing minimum wage to go to school full time and pass their classes, that will help. Whether their current achievement level is first grade or Master’s student, whether the classes are in reading and arithmetic or theoretical physics or trade school A/C repair or big rig driving, make learning one of the full-time minimum wage jobs available to anybody over the age of 15, and watch crime evaporate.
Because existential despair will evaporate. A route out that only requires work and a manageable level of sacrifice will exist, and because they will (on average) learn to do something that pays two or three times minimum wage, within a few years, they will leave class system and contribute more to society through a productive effort, instead of a destructive one. It will be an investment that betters our economic productivity, and an “investment” because they will more than pay it back (through their greater volume of taxes paid at their higher salary for their working career) all the money society invested in their education, and saving their life.
Not everybody will take the opportunity, not everybody will finish it, but many will.
Check out this article, Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Moms.
The short answer is: Because the typical drug dealer earns less than half of minimum wage ($3.30 / hr), and this is the only job they can get.
Venkatesh is the academic that conducted and analyzed the field work described in this article. In his paper he describes when a minimum wage entry level job opened up at the local McDonald’s, the line of applicants (for one job) wrapped around the block.
If they are willing to stand behind a counter doing that 8 hours a day for minimum wage, most of them would be willing to learn a trade for 8 hours a day for minimum wage.
The cause of crime is chronic poverty producing desperation. The cause of drug abuse and drug dealing is chronic poverty producing desperation. To reduce crime, reduce chronic poverty, and thereby desperation.
All this is easy to say for a guy who has always lived his life behind a security net second only to the US Secret Service. He has only the vaguest clue about the poor. He is an authoritarian personality with deep-seated need for control. He is not in this job for the money or even public service for the people. He is an oligarch, needing power and control to satisfy his psychological needs. If there is a public service side to him, it is to be of service to his own ilk, and not to the 99%.
As Dr. Roy Grinker wrote years ago, the super rich are different from the rest of us, and cannot relate on almost any dimension to people who are not wealthy like them.
You might have guessed by now that Mayor Bloomberg is not on my holiday card mailing list.
“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?’”
Am I the only one who, when they read this line, yelled out loud, “No! No, I don’t want someone stopping people for the crime of being a stranger!”
It’s amazing that NYC and San Francisco, two supposed bastions of liberalism, have produced such virulent attackers of civil liberties.
Hotsie, Totsi. I smell a Nazi.
–Curly, Three Stooges, circa 1945
Darren thanks for writing about this. NYC is where GS works hand in hand with local/state/federal authorities to protect wall street. They used facial recognition from their HQ during OWS. GS employees and other private contractors move in and out of that HQ as if they own it, which I’m sure they largely do!
I agree with Mike A. that this is part of the criminalization of being poor but I believe it is also one more attempt to surveil and control this population. It’s a co-ordinated effort by private contractors, and all levels of govt. It’s also very profitable. NY is very important to them because they are afraid there will be another OWS. They forced OWS marchers to take retinal scans. After fingerprints, these will be next. We are in a police state.
Orwellian, unAmerican, crazy, oppressive, sicko, etc. come to mind.
Another example of our ongoing policy at every level of government…
“You should be afraid, very afraid, and we are there to protect you.”
Reminds me of the Big Bang Theory, the guys are stumped by security, but a girl scout selling cookies just goes up and swipes all the call buttons and gets buzzed into the building….LoL…
It must be very frustrating to be Michael Bloomberg and have ALL the answers, and run into such resistance in their implementation on such trivial grounds as civil liberties.
Too tired to offer a defense of Mayor Bloomberg and Rudolph Giuliani. But, just so there’s at least one positive remark on this thread: Guys like Mayor Bloomberg, Rudolph Giuliani, William Bratton, and James Q. Wilson–what a great bunch of guys.
One nefarious politician simply opens the door and a phalanx of crooks marches in. The pi…uh, “cops” will want to use it to track people who have not committed crimes, a warrantless means of monitoring people.
You can bet the farm the monitoring won’t be limited to who enters but when, and other government agencies want it as well. It’s almost certain that welfare offices want it to snoop on people and “prove” fraud or accuse people who haven’t committed fraud. .
Tenant: “I went home for lunch after my 10am job interview.”
Bureaucrat teabagger: “No you didn’t! You watched TV all day!”
If the system only monitors when people enter, not when they leave, that is a real possibility.
And who else can buy and access that information? Salesmen? Debt collectors? Private investigators? I’ll bet such scum will also be allowed into the building, their fingerprints “approved” for entry. Tenants will be controlled, while filth will have the run of the place.
Is there anybody left in NYC who make less than $500,000 that still respects the mayor?
Will somebody please tell the mayor that bond salesmen are not the only players who have game. Any street hustler who cannot figure out how to talk his way into a building has already starved to death. The rest of them aren’t going to be slowed down by a biometric scanner.
Once inside it is easy enough to jam most locks with Kleenex, toilet paper, newspaper, a dollar bill will usually work.
The last time I had any contact with public housing the challenge was to keep the locks in working order, let alone maintain biometric scanners.
Maybe the mayor should try to fix some of the low tech, unglamorous problems first – like keeping locks fixed and unjammed, and strangers from following residents into the buildings.
I doubt this proposal will do much for safety. But some good might come from it if there is a significant set aside to hire fingerprint technicians and scanner maintenance workers from the projects.
Darren, I believe that your reference to criminalizing the poor fits the bill here, although Bloomberg appears capable of providing a benignly despotic explanation for whatever he proposes. This is on a level with mandatory drug testing of welfare applicants and prohibiting food stamp recipients from buying lottery tickets.
And I thought Rudy Giuliani was a miserable thug. Mike Bloomberg keeps showing a dictatorial streak that is belied by his mild manner. I spent many years dealing with tenants of NYC’s projects. They were underfunded, badly conceived high rise structures that suffered from constant neglect. Bloomberg has transformed a City I love into a playground for his wealthy peers. To him it seems the rest of its citizens are either servants, or riff-raff.
Why doesn’t he just let the residents buy guns??? That would stop a lot of the crime.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Why doesn’t he just step up and have himself fingerprinted if it’s such a benign exercise?
or they could have officers live there.
What a bargain: a Mayor with $1.00/year salary!!!
His affection towards his citizens is over-pouring!
He should buy, and we’ll be happy to sell him, one more term as a Mayor of NY. Term limits are for poor people who are lazy and incompetent. They sure need a ‘Benito’ father!
God, please have mercy on US.
The legacy of mayor Bloomberg will be a legacy of the deterioration of civil rights in the city and a plundering of the City’s treasury and land by developers who trash each and every neighborhood while snatching every tax benefit and public grant they can. His forays in public health, gun control and gay rights were nothing more than window dressing to distract residents from almost mega maniacal desire to prove just how much power he has and that no one can question him on how he will use it.
He is a dictator waiting to happen!