AS A RULE, this magazine is not especially squeamish about cracking down on
crime. We do not normally break out in a cold sweat every time we hear a civil
liberties campaigner denounce this or that government policy on DNA
fingerprinting as intrusive and unfair. But we do sit up and listen when the
people sounding the alarm include top forensic experts, government advisers and
the very scientist who invented DNA fingerprinting, Alec Jeffreys
(see 鈥淲hat鈥檚 in a fingerprint鈥�).
In fact, 鈥渁larm鈥� is putting it mildly. Jeffreys and his friends are nothing
less than outraged. The British government is just a hair鈥檚 breadth from passing
laws that will give the nation鈥檚 bobbies the power to take DNA samples from
innocent people and keep them indefinitely, along with computer profiles based
on those samples. That, say the protestors, is a clear strike against justice
and fairness. It is hard to disagree.
Police in Britain already have the right to take (by force if necessary) DNA
samples from anyone taken into custody, from murder suspects right down to the
unlucky student suspected of smoking cannabis. The new laws will entitle the
police to keep those samples and profiles on file even if the suspect turns out
to be innocent. That should be unthinkable in any self-respecting
democracy鈥攁nd in most it is.
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Across Europe, mandatory DNA testing is restricted to people charged with
serious offences, and all DNA records must be destroyed if a suspect is cleared
or acquitted. In the US, even those arraigned on serial murder charges have the
right to refuse to give a DNA sample. Indeed in some states, even convicted
criminals are allowed to withhold their DNA.
That is pushing civil liberties too far. But equally, putting people with no
convictions on a police database which exists solely to be trawled for links
between suspects and crimes is pushing the interests of the state too far. What
is particularly Big Brotherish about the British proposal is that even if you
are eliminated from an inquiry you will not have the right to ask for your DNA
records and saliva sample to be destroyed or given back. In effect, the
sample鈥攃ontaining the very blueprint that makes you the person you
are鈥攚ill have become the property of the state. The authorities didn鈥檛
need your consent to take it. They won鈥檛 need your consent to keep it.
Not long ago, Britain was convulsed with emotional fury over the news that
certain hospitals and pathologists had been retaining the organs and tissues of
dead children without proper consent. And following the completion of the first
draft of the human genome, there are increasing worries about the potential
abuse of genetic information. So why the deafening silence now over the plan to
keep thousands of DNA samples without consent?
Perhaps most people believe that the vast majority of suspects taken into
custody must have done something wrong鈥攅ven if the police cannot prove it
in court鈥攁nd that keeping their DNA records is therefore not only morally
justified but will help catch them next time round. Well, no doubt some
offenders do escape justice this way. But will keeping every acquitted suspect鈥檚
DNA on file help catch them? Not as much as you might think. Astonishingly, up
to 80,000 such DNA samples have been retained already in Britain, albeit
illegally. Yet so far there seem to have been only a handful of publicly
acknowledged matches between these DNA profiles and ones later found at crime
scenes鈥攈ardly a huge advance in crime fighting.
What would help is for the police to take many more DNA samples from the
scenes of crimes and process them more efficiently. Last year, a scathing Home
Office report found huge variation in the proportion of crime scenes examined
for DNA in different parts of the country. In one area, only half the samples
collected were actually submitted for analysis. No doubt funding has something
to do with this but the fact is that if you don鈥檛 collect DNA from crime scenes
you will not catch criminals, no matter how many saliva samples you take from
people hauled into custody.
Of course, DNA fingerprinting is a powerful form of evidence which has helped
convict tens of thousands of offenders. But we mustn鈥檛 be blind to the need for
checks and balances on how it is collected by the police and used in court.
After all, the kind of totalitarian state George Orwell envisaged doesn鈥檛 spring
up overnight. It鈥檚 more likely to creep into existence through the erosion of
small freedoms and small rights to privacy.
It is time for a bit of fury. And a full and open debate.