Liberating the Criminal
The Government is to wipe clean its DNA database. That was the headline, although careful reading suggests that not all will be lost.
What is lost, or missing from this debate, is the view of those who believe that this craven act, in response to a European court ruling, weighs the criminal justice system even more towards the thug and against the decent citizen.
So this blog carries a health warning. I am in favour of the police keeping records people like me who are not criminals who have everything to gain from being part of a national DNA database which would catch many murderous suspects and bring their trail to a safe conclusion.
Look what the figures tell us. I asked the Home Office back in March 2006 for the number of major crimes solves due the use of the police DNA database.
Thanks to an amendment to the police and criminal evidence act in 2001 – so we are talking about a fairly short period of time – 8,493 profiles of individuals have been linked to crime scenes involving 13,964 offences.
These offences included 214 murders, 55 attempted murders, 116 rapes, 68 sexual offences, 119 aggravated burglaries and 127 supplying controlled drugs.
More recent figures are even more impressive there are 3100 DNA matches per month and over the period from April 1998 to March 2008 there have been over 272,000 detections which probably would not have been made otherwise.
It is worth rereading those figures again. The likelihood is that none of those criminals would have been found, brought to trial and sentences had it not been for the police DNA database. Criminals have everything to fear from this database and we innocent citizens had no such fear.
In my constituency a young mother was murdered but no-one charged. Years later the murderer set alight to the little shop which was used as the local mosque when an individual was inside. DNA samples from this site linked back to the murder scene. He was convicted of murder.
Would it not have been better to put the resources which are being wasted on ID cards into building up this most effective way of weighting justice in favour of effectiveness? Should this not have been an area where Government sought a derivation from the human rights legislation so that balance of our criminal justice was kept in favour of the innocent and not the guilty?
What about a movement by those of use who would quite happily offer our DNA sample to be included on the database? We have nothing to lose other than those criminals who wish us harm.
Date added: Thursday 7th May 2009
Comments
Home secretary Jacqui Smith thought she could outsmart the combined and unanimous view of the judges, who felt that the UK should differentiate better between criminals, the severity of their crimes and innocent people who found themselves on a data base widely reviled as a breach of privacy and human rights.So she came up with a clever proposal that doesn’t keep everyone on this data base for a hundred years, but … – Automatically delete profiles of those arrested but not convicted of serious violent or sexual crimes after 12 years; – Automatically delete profiles of those arrested but not convicted of all other crimes after six years;Well that is really going to be of immense comfort to those innocents, who feel they shouldn’t be stigmatized by being on the same data base in the first place! That is like asking a rape victim if it felt less offensive after the 6th or the 12th time!If you created this movement Frank, you would create a movement against the Data Protection Law 1988, esspecially the third principle. Is that what you advocate Frank?And bythe way, Steve Wright was not an innocent on this database, he was there by rights as a convicted criminal. By blindly quoting DNA matching numbers rather than convictions based on these matches you are just repeating meaningless propaganda, without challenging what those numbers really mean in terms of solved crimes.
Report this post – Anonymous
I usually think that Frank Field speaks more sense than most people, but on the issue of the DNA database, I fear he is neglecting one rather important point.He correctly points out the number of matches that have been made leading to cases being re-opened and suspects being brought to trial.However he neglects to consider the possibility of false matches being made. Supposing that a false match can occur in one case out of a thousand. If the database then contains the details of 60 million people, then there is the possibility of 60,000 false matches occurring, or potentially 60,000 serious miscarriages of justice.
Report this post – Anonymous