Newswise — On January 4, 1998, police in London arrested a man, whom court records call B, on suspicion of burglary. The police swabbed the inside of the suspect's cheek to collect a sample of his DNA. In August, B was acquitted and released. But in September, B's DNA profile was--accidentally and illegally--entered into the United Kingdom's national DNA database. The system automatically compares newly loaded DNA profiles against unidentified samples obtained from crime scenes. The system found a match--a sample from a 1997 rape and assault case. The police arrested B, and the government successfully prosecuted him for those crimes.
Is there anything wrong with such a turn of events? Privacy advocates say there is, as do people worried about racial discrimination. Among these are lawyers working with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council for Responsible Genetics, in the United States, and with GeneWatch and Privacy International, in the United Kingdom. Law-enforcement officials and forensic scientists, on the other hand, say the use of such a tool is invaluable for solving crimes, not only to match evidence from a recent crime to an individual in the database but also to link some unsolved cases, showing that they share an as-yet-unknown perpetrator.
Since that 1998 incident, governments have been rapidly expanding the collection of DNA for databases. DNA databases may help solve crimes, but they are also abetting racial discrimination. Indeed, new ways of using such databases--for example, to identify members of a suspect's family--as well as a growing tendency to mandate sampling of arrestees, not just convicts, for such databases, increases their tendency to target minorities. In this article, criminal justice scholar Simon A. Cole explains why databases discriminate racially and explores whether a universal database, with all citizens being sampled, might be more equitable, if not palatable to the public.
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