San Francisco Homeless Fingerprinting Plan Limited to 2,500 People

March 23, 2003 - Privacy News

In response to criticism by homeless advocates and a city Supervisor of an earlier plan to require fingerprints of everybody seeking a bed in an emergency shelter, San Francisco city officials have decided to limit the requirement to only the roughly 2,500 homeless people affected by the the new "Care Not Cash" initiative. The biggest fear about the requirement was that it would scare away undocumented immigrants -- while the city did not plan to open the database to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), as a city employee admitted, people were unlikely to trust that this would not occur at some point in the future. The director of the Mission Resource Center remains concerned that everybody will still have to place a finger on the imaging system to determine whether they are part of the database.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

More information is available at <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/03/20/MN251870.DTL>.

Last updated March 24, 2003