The Utter Moral Bankruptcy of the DNA database.

The Utter Moral Bankruptcy of the DNA Database ??

Gee, few people declared that a fingerprint database or a mugshot database was somehow immoral. Why are we more sensitive when it comes to our dna? Oh sure, there are excesses at times in feeding profiles into dna databases. Some infants are now in police databases. One man had his dna added to a police database because he owned the firm wherein an employee had sent an email using the word "likey" which was deemed to be suggestive of a politically incorrect euphemism for a racial classification of an applicant for a building permit. And people do seem more and more troubled by such extremes of political correctness, overly broad rules and a growing lack of concern for the possibility of error.

Yet there is a growing concern over openness and ultimate effectiveness.

Scientists and lawyers are fighting to get the entire CODIS database opened to expose errors and false positives. Interesting to scientists and statisticians but I fear it would be misused in the hands of lawyers when presented to overwhelmed jurors and judges. Yet, it seems that we are at our most vulnerable whenever the highly valued technology is relied upon. We rely on GPS systems and unwisely drive into remote areas during inclement weather. We find that even a Detective Constable such as Shirley McKie is unable to overcome the presumption of infallibility of the database and the political shenanigans that to this day have the Scottish fingerprint authorities tenaciously clinging to an identification that over 200 fingerprints experts describe as clearly erronious. We find administrative and processing errors in handling dna-laden forensic evidence and yet the database results are usually accepted without question.

"...Criminal detection using the UK DNA database have fallen 25 percent over the past two years despite the number of profiles increasing by 1m and its running costs doubling to £4.2m a year." This fragment from Opendotdotdot fails to appropriately differentiate between identification of criminal suspects and the ultimate prosecution of crimes, yet it is interesting to note that there is some value to the concept even though the numbers are a bit misleading.

"...This "most effective tool for the prevention and detection of crime since the development of fingerprint analysis" is getting ever-less effective and more costly, and infringing on the rights of ever more people..." Well, just about everything is more costly and infringing on more rights than before.

"...The UK government is continuing to foist this intrusive, disproportionate, racist and morally repugnant approach.". It is clear that some people do indeed hold strong views on the matter and do express them in a colorful manner. Do we expect the London Bobby to go strolling around in the bitter cold or to stay in the warm stationhouse doing paperwork and profiling? Each activity undoubtedly has some benefits to it and some direct costs to it as well. In emphasizing a consideration of cost some are arguing that there is a cost to society as police become more involved with technological surveillance than in walking a beat and interacting with the populace in a friendly and supportive manner. A great many crimes now solved by personal contact rather than tecnology will go unsolved when the people lose trust and the police become soley an intrusive surveillance force.

Irrespective of what societal changes may or may not be taking place, its important to remember that a slavish adherence to a database can be just as damaging as a slavish adherence to any profile, rule of thumb, guideline or mistaken notion of routine procedures. Just as parents are most vulnerable when they lose a child, so too are defendants most vulnerable when a database error is relied on. Its not the database that is morally repugnant as much as those who would excessively feed the database or excessively rely upon it.