Bloomberg endorses fingerprinting housing project residents for their own good

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) put forward an idea on Friday to install fingerprint scanners in the city's Housing Authority projects.

The Staten Island Advance reported that Bloomberg made the remarks during his weekly interview on WOR-AM, saying the scanners would help determine who is living in those apartments without a lease.

"If you have a stranger walking in the halls of your apartment building, don't you want somebody to stop and say, 'Who are you? Why're you here?'" Bloomberg asked host John Gambling.

The idea was criticized by two candidates for the Democratic primary nomination, Christine Quinn and Bill de Blasio.

"It's a completely ludicrous and outrageous notion that (Housing Authority) residents and their guests should have to be fingerprinted to gain access to their own homes and to visit family and friends," Quinn told the Advance.

WLNY-TV also reported on Friday that Bloomberg followed through on his promise to appeal a federal judge's ruling that the city's heavily-panned "stop and frisk" policy was unconstitutional.

"What does she know about policing? Absolutely zero," Bloomberg told Gambling, referring to District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin. "Your safety and the safety of your kids is now in the hands of some woman who does not have the expertise to do it."

The mayor also rebuked Quinn and de Blasio, though not by name, for their support of Scheindlin's ruling, which called for an independent monitor to oversee local police's compliance with her verdict.

"They want to be mayor, but they want to have outsiders come in and tell them what to do," Bloomberg said to Gambling. "To try to walk away from it away from responsibility so they’ll be someone else to blame is just an outrage."

Watch WLNY's report on Bloomberg's idea for housing project residents, aired Friday, below.