Fingerprint and Drug Test Public Housing Residents?

To keep public housing developments safe, and free of drug users/dealers, and trouble causing non-residents, cities are, or would like to, drug testing residents, and proposing to fingerprint them.

But, like with NYC's controversial stop-and-frisk program, some residents feel these measures treat everyone like a criminal, and are not a good trade of liberty in return for safety.

Are these good, or bad ideas?

Lots of folks -- including city employees, like cops -- are subject to drug testing at their place of employment. If you want the public to subsidize your rent, what can be reasonably asked of you?

And, fingerprinting may sound drastic, but it's just the latest, and most secure, way to ensure you allowing entrance to authorized individuals. Some of the restaurants I work with use fingerprints to sign into work.

 

Just have the NSA park a drone over the housing and also monitor all internet and phone conversations

We know that is legal. Why try something new that has not past the legal test?

 

The dorms where I went to college had hand scanners in 1998, so that's not even really new technology. Of course, it was never difficult to get someone to let you in.

I'm not sure I buy the idea that they're a solution to broken door locks, though. Technology breaks too, and this is more likely to break in a way that keeps out someone who should be in.

As for drug testing public housing recipients, absolutely not. "If you want the public to subsidize your rent" is a dreadful, spurious argument that assumes inherent laziness on the part of the recipient. Moreover, what's the point of drug testing? You can pass a drug test and still be a detriment to the development, and you can fail one and not be.

No one ever suggests drug testing farmers who receive agricultural subsidies.

 

Yeah, but drug dealing is the major source of crime in public housing.

Drugs bring guns into public housing. They are the source of "turf wars". You have unsavory customers coming in and out at all hours. CHildren get recruited into drug operations to work as lookouts or runners.

There is a reason to want a "drug free" building.

How do you achieve this?

 

Also a major source of vandalism with junkies stealing stuff from buildings to sell for drug money.

 

By properly policing the developments? By hiring appropriate levels of security? Not by assuming everyone's guilty until they're proven innocent. I think you guys have a whole long document about that sort of thing.

Not to mention that those individuals are still going to end up somewhere. They aren't just going to disappear. This would be a solution that treats the symptom, not the underlying causes, and not even a treatment that would work particularly well.

Or possibly by decriminalizing certain softer drugs. But that's a different can of worms ...

 

Ignoring the insult to the residents - this thing is probably prohibatively expensive.

 

Freedom was only meant for land-owning white guys.

 

I'm all for it.

 

And, how do you do this?

I'm not trying to be a smart ass. This is the million dollar question, isn't it?

Stop-and-frisk is under attack, as are the "vertical patrols" the NYPD conducts within NYCHA buildings:

Now, regardless of what you think of stop-and-frisk, I think it's reasonable to assume that policing will be harder in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods and housing developments.

So, what to do?

Is being drug tested and/or fingerprinted really intrusive? Does it "treat you like a criminal"?

I've been subject to drug testing in order to get hired, and to remain employed. I had to get fingerprinted to be a commodities trader.

If you want to work in a fast food restaurant, you may have to use your fingerprint to sign in.

This stuff is standard.

 

Not if it works.

The drug testing is already in place in Chicago.

The fingerprinting technology is becoming cheap and ubiquitous. The next generation iPhone will include it as a security feature. Restaurant POS systems already use it.

If crime, and the cost of policing public housing, can be lowered, the systems will more than pay for themselves.

And, if it can reduce tactics like "stop-and-frisk", is it a good, less intrusive, alternative?

 

OK, if you do that, then residents get picture IDs that are valid at all voting booths under state law. Deal?