Something that drives some people crazy is the idea of the Government or the police keeping databases on the public. I know that the Government departments do not have a great record on keeping these things secure, the Inland Revenue managed to lose a whole database of 25m taxpayers a few years ago and they always seem to be leaving laptops and DVD's in the back of taxis or on trains.
The new Government have decided to back down on the idea of a DNA database and i think that is a shame because if it was down to me, i would expand it to include everyone.
Just this week a murderer was caught for a crime committed a few years ago using DNA and this seems to be becoming a more regular occurrence. It has also cleared innocent people who have been wrongly jailed.
Of course the crimes can only be solved if the DNA of a suspect is on the database otherwise it is back to old fashioned detective work.
If there was a secure DNA database of everyone in the country, crimes would be quickly solved and we would be almost certain that we had the right person standing in the dock.
It seems a waste of an opportunity but the concerns are how secure it would be and if it would be used for other purposes such as profiling or details sold on by dodgy coppers looking to make a quick quid to more shady areas. There is also the problem of DNA being planted that could cause problems but a bit of police work should be able to eliminate most of these cases.
If this can somehow be secured by limiting access or fragmenting the database so nobody has access to all of it, then i would fully support expanding it to include everyone here.
4 comments:
It seems as though you British have a much weaker natural fear of tyranny than we do here in the States. The tacit rule for us is: "never give the government power that you wouldn't want in the hands of someone incompetent or evil".
And the law isn't so straightforward as one might expect. Juries might sometimes put more stock in DNA than they should. What if the defendant knows the accused? Prosecutors will always be tempted to present DNA as a smoking gun a few steps before they have properly established that DNA being in a particular location is noteworthy evidence.
One should take a lesson from my local crime lab. In Texas at least, and surely across the other states, prosecutors and police tout "conviction rates". This seems to have led to occasional tag switching and such. You get the defendant's DNA and you relabel it as DNA from the crime-scene, and there you've made your case to convict the guy. So I'd always prefer it if the prosecutor's folks had to do cover the old fashioned bases before holding out flashing "smoking guns".
Fortunately for us here in America, such databases would have to be state-by-state if they would pass as constitutional at all and an all-mandatory DNA database would have to come a long time after a gun-owners database.
There are those worries that you state nog but then we have worries about what we have at the moment and the DNA has to be more reliable.
"Those who would give up Liberty to purchase Security, deserve neither Liberty nor Security."
Ben Franklin
Nog,
when you wrote: "the tacit rule for us is never give the government power that you wouldn't want in the hands of someone incompetent or evil" you were kidding right?
because if that were true we wouldn't have income tax, social security, welfare, national health care, the FAA, FDA, FCC, etc.
q
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