Mayor Bill de Blasio is expressing frustration over the failure of a bill in Albany that he says would have helped reduce violence at the city's massive jail complex on Rikers Island. State House Reporter Zack Fink filed the following report.

With unprecedented levels of violence on Rikers Island, the de Blasio administration was pushing for state legislation that would have enabled body scanners to be used by correction officers. The scanners are considered to be more effective than body searches to detect contraband, including weapons.

But although the bill passed the State Senate, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie never brought it up for a vote, causing a political rift between usual allies.

"I'm very disappointed," de Blasio said. "It's such a common-sense thing. You know, you go into an airport and you go through a scanner, and whether we love the experience or not, we all understand it.

"But imagine — we know right now on Rikers Island for decades there's been the problem of weapons being brought in, and contraband and drugs being brought in, and we know this," de Blasio continued.

Spearheading the opposition to the body scanner bill was the former chair of the Assembly Corrections Committee, Assemblyman Daniel O'Donnell, who convinced enough of his colleagues that inmates could be subjected to dangerous levels of radiation.

"Just remember when you go to an airport, you voluntarily choose to put yourself through that," O'Donnell said. "You are talking about pre-trial detainees who have been convicted of nothing, who could be put through the machine over and over again. The people that are proposing to run the machines are not certified, trained lab techs."

Supporters of the bill say the risk of radiation exposure is far lower than O'Donnell suggests, and the explosion of violence at Rikers has posed a much higher safety risk.

"In the last three years, more than 700 inmates have been stabbed or slashed — some getting 150 to 250 stitches," said Elias Husamudeen, the president of the Correction Officers' Benevolent Association. "We have had more than eight New York City corrections officers slashed by inmates. What do we have to freakin' do for these people to put safety above the politics?"

Mayor de Blasio is hopeful the bill can be revived again next year. But if David Weprin — the Queens Assemblyman who chairs the Assembly Corrections Committee — could not get it through this year, and the same opposition forces remain in the Assembly next year, it seems unlikely that the bill will get a second life in 2018.