WE'RE ALL SUSPECTS NOW

Innocent or guilty, the police want to keep tabs on your
DNA

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 p 9).

In fact, "alarm" is putting it mildly. Jeffreys and his friends are
nothing less than outraged. The British government is just a hair's
breadth from passing laws that will give the nation's 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-and in
most it is.

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-containing
the very blueprint that makes you the person you are-will have become
the property of the state. The authorities didn't need your consent to
take it. They won't 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-even if the police cannot
prove it in court-and that keeping their DNA records is therefore not
only morally justified but will help catch them next time round. Weil,
no doubt some offenders do escape justice this way. But will keeping
every acquitted suspect's 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-hardly
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't 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't 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't spring up overnight. It's 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.