Arrest Offenders Randomly and “INSERT INTO UK_DNA_DATABASE”

You probably might be wondering what the title really means and if you haven’t yet read the news about how UK police officers are on the hunt for past offenders (typically young blacks) not for interrogation or trying them in courts but only because their DNA’s will ‘enrich’ the national DNA database. You thought it was a joke? No, this is happening in the broad daylight while civil rights is fast asleep. Sorry but I can’t hold back but be biased.

So what happens when governments start profiling their citizen’s DNA this way? Nothing happened in the UK and I have strong reason to believe that nothing will happen anywhere else too. Such (mal)practices rarely get caught. If UK police really wants to build up a criminal database then there has to be a more respectable way of doing that instead of just randomly picking someone and collecting his/her DNA. This is cruel and has to be stopped.

And this is what the commission has to say:

The commission had received evidence from a former police superintendent that it was now the norm to arrest offenders for everything possible. "It is apparently understood by serving police officers that one of the reasons, if not the reason, for the change in practice is so that the DNA of the offender can be obtained," said Montgomery, adding that it would be a matter of very great concern if this was now a widespread practice.

But the irony of the situation is that “there is very little concrete evidence on the importance of the DNA match in leading to a conviction and whether the suspect would have been identified by other means anyway.”

huh? We heard of government databases landing into the wrong hands results in several cases of data misuse but did we ever bother to look into how some of these databases are populated?