James D. Stallardblog

For the benefit of the record, I am very pro-police and very anti erosion of privacy.

The clamour for removal of around 1,000,000 records from the UK national DNA database is a disaster for the police.

There are so many records in the database, and the Police are so bogged down in paperwork, that they have resorted to DNA as the first and almost the only line of enquiry. DNA has become the evidential panacea to the Police and public, when it is far more susceptible to tampering than almost any other kind of evidence.

This has of course resulted in an unacceptably large number of wrongful arrests and wrongful convictions as contamination during collection, analysis and processing is married to the significant number of inaccuracies in the source database itself.

The reasons for the disaster is as follows:

. Innocent people will no longer be available to accuse without actually doing some police work to go and at least check an alibi before arrest. The Police are so tied up with pointless paperwork and targets only a committee could have come up with, that they don’t have the time to go and be Policemen.

. There is a significant risk that inaccuracies in the source database will cause the records of the guilty to be thrown out with those of the innocent. Paradoxically, this will be used an excuse to keep the records of the innocent in the database.

The problems with a pervasive database of DNA are many and serious:
. You as an innocent party can (and will) be accused at any time of any crime, because a small particle of you, floating on the wind, happened to settle in an inconvenient place. Having been accused, the accusation will be kept on file for ever and will be made available to the criminal records bureau (even though you are innocent of any crime) who will silently and without recourse, bar you from any job involving contact (and potential contact) with children or other vulnerable members of society. It has been estimated that one quarter of all jobs in the uk will come under CRB checking, so you could be forced out of work for the rest of your life.

. No one in the civil service cares one iota about who gets their hands on our personal data, because they are not personally held responsible for it’s safety. History has proven time and again that no responsibility and no accountability, absolutely guarantees that sensitive data will fall into the public domain. If a criminal has your DNA records, who knows what they could be used for. Without exclusive access to the one thing that proves who you are, you have no way of resurrecting your identity after yet another security breach.

. This government has created thousands of laws criminalising various behaviours, but done nothing to stop the causes of those behaviours. It has passed laws to make it illegal for you to deny the Police a DNA sample on arrest (on the grounds of breach of privacy, for instance), but has done nothing to criminalise abuse of the records it collects. This has (as in every case) caused otherwise law-abiding people to be branded criminal for simply protecting their privacy in the most innocuous (and previously acceptable) fashion.

The day we are forced to contribute to a national DNA database of every citizen, is the day the innocent and law-abiding start to leave the country. To stop the bad-guys from escaping, would the last one out please close the door.