Neil Harding’s DNA
Here, most unfortunately, we go again.
I recently posted about the partisan brain, and about how Neil Harding rather exemplifies it. It seems he was all too eager to offer up another example.
Mr Harding, it would seem, wishes to go even further than some police offers, who recently suggested that we should collect DNA for anyone who is arrested. He thinks that we should collect DNA from everyone (presumably at birth — who knows?) and keep it on file, just in case you commit a crime.
Harding says that the DNA database helps police catch the “correct perpetrators of many crimes”. He says that the success of the database is “unquestionable”. His use of words is interesting, considering that people are, in fact, questioning it: just last week, in Liberty’s response to the Home Office consultation on PACE, they asserted that the National DNA Database “does not seem to have a significant impact upon crime detection”. In fact, although the number of samples on the database has increased steadily since it was introduced…
…the rate of crime detected using the database has stayed at about 0.35% of all recorded crime (see Liberty response). If the database were so useful, one would expect that it would facilitate the detection of more crimes as it grew larger. That does not seem to be the case. It is, therefore, of questionable value. I’m sure it has a place, but collecting the DNA of everyone arrested, let alone everyone alive, is not it.
Another terribly important point to make is that all systems have a rate of failure. Although (bar twins) an individual’s DNA is unique, we are not necessarily able to collect, store or compare samples with sufficient precision to make a DNA profile unique to an individual. Just as with fingerprints, DNA profiling techniques do experience false positives and false negatives, and just as with fingerprints, these rates are more than one might expect. Here is an excellent page detailing many such experiences.
I’ve written about these problems before, so I’ll leave the subject there, except to say that a good way to deal with these problems is to keep the database as small as possible. By keeping the database small, one minimises the number of failures, making them more manageable. This, quite neatly, makes it eminently sensible to restrict people placed onto the database to those convicted of a crime: perhaps even only those convicted of a serious crime. The usefulness of the system is maintained, as is the privacy of innocent people: something which, quite clearly, Harding grossly undervalues.
PS: If the database is so fantastically useful, and if a person being arrested is a useful indicator of criminality, why didn’t Levy, Evans and Turner have their DNA sampled?
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