Where's the debate on the DNA database?

It contains the profiles of a million innocent people and lacks basic safeguards – but it has no legislative foundation

• 
• • Diane Abbott
  • guardian.co.uk,
  • Wednesday July 30 2008
  • Article history

A government-funded inquiry is calling for the DNA profile of people, who have not actually been convicted of a crime, to be removed from the national DNA database.

Britain has the largest DNA database in the world. There are over 4.2 million people on it. But a million of those people have never been convicted of anything. And 50,000 of them are children. Millions of these profiles are given to private companies without the consent of individuals. Yet the DNA database has mushroomed with no basis in legislation. And members of parliament have never been given the opportunity to vote on it.

Perhaps, if the database did have some legislative foundation, there would have been a chance to put in place the safeguards which are lamentably lacking from the current system.

Forty per cent of black men are on it, but only 9% of white men.

This bears no correlation to relative arrest or conviction rates. And the police seem determined to hold on to their power to put people on the database in a completely arbitrary way.

I saw this when a friend had her 14-year-old daughter's DNA sample taken because she happened to get a lift home in a car which was stopped by the police. No one was charged, no offence had been committed, but the police took it upon themselves to take a DNA sample from her. They tried to suggest to the parents subsequently that it was mandatory for them to do this. It was only when I took up the case with government ministers that they admitted that it was at their own discretion.

Six hundred and forty five rapists have been caught using the DNA database.

But I doubt that many of them were 14-year-old girls. Yet the police had the power to criminalise my friend's daughter with no appeal and no safeguards.

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, the man who actually invented DNA fingerprinting, is concerned. He says:

The national DNA database is a very powerful tool in the fight against crime, but recent developments such as the retention of innocent people's DNA raises significant ethical and social issues. The real concern I have in the UK is what I see as a sort of 'mission creep'. When the DNA database was initially established, it was to database DNA from criminals so if they re-offended, they could be picked up. Now hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent people are populating that database.

Professor Stephen Bain, a member of the Human Genetics Commission, said much greater consideration had gone into databases put together for research purposes than for the national DNA database used for forensic purposes.

Lord Justice Sedley has said that the police are engaging in crude ethnic profiling. He says this is indefensible and it would be fairer to include everyone, innocent or guilty. This would be a huge step.

But there is no doubt that a proper debate on the uses and abuses of the DNA database is long overdue.

Selected Comments All comments (62)

• MoveAnyMountain

  Jul 31 08, 10:04am (about 13 hours ago)

  May I once again point out that this database which "has not legislative basis" does in fact have so - under the Criminal and Police Justice Act 2001.

  Which Diane Abbott voted for on not just one occasion but at least three that I can see.

  So we have an article here from someone who voted for this database, decrying it and claiming that it is not legal. Despite the fact she approved the legislation that gave the police the powers she thinks they should not have.

  Priceless.

  I think that needed to be said again in case anyone missed it the first time.

DNA database - Unequal record

All comments (2)

• Editorial
• The Guardian,
• Wednesday July 30 2008
• Article history

Just after 9am on Monday September 10 1984, Sir Alec Jeffreys, a professor of genetics, triggered a revolution. He compared a DNA sample from one of his colleagues with that of the man's wider family and found a pattern. The discovery made DNA fingerprinting possible. The benefits are undeniable. No one would wish the invention undone.

But the process, and the British database it has generated, the most extensive in the world, has blurred the divide between private and public, innocent and guilty - a state intrusion into the genetic makeup of individuals that, until now, has been little monitored and could be easily abused.

The dilemmas are more ethical than scientific. It would be possible, if costly and illiberal, to record information from everyone legally resident in the UK. Sir Alec, who in an interview in the Engineer magazine this week rightly described a universal database as "wholly inappropriate", is not the only one to object to that idea - yesterday a citizen's jury set up by the Human Genetics Commission opposed it too. But if only some people are to be included, then it is all the more important that the rules are fair and people have a right of appeal.

The current situation, in which data from some 4.5 million people is held by chance, either because (innocent or guilty) they were arrested for a recordable offence or because they volunteered their DNA to help an investigation, is a bad compromise.

The risk is that the register ceases to be treated as an impartial forensic tool and becomes a list of the usual suspects - with the simple fact of inclusion implying possible guilt.

The recent DNA expansion programme, which sought to include all "active offenders", made the database more useful - but may also have exacerbated its bias. The fact that people who come into contact with the police are the most likely to be included has produced a distorted record, weighted towards certain sections of the population - especially young black men, up to three-quarters of whom may now be included, out of proportion to their actual involvement in crime.

The government admits that this is a problem. But

it has been reluctant to limit the sprawl on the grounds that the bigger the database, the more likely criminals are to be caught in its net.

But that is a recipe for a universal record by stealth. In April, the Home Office's advisory DNA Ethics Group urged a limit on the use of information provided by innocent volunteers. Yesterday the citizens' jury suggested people who are acquitted should have their names removed, among other ideas to prevent uncontrolled expansion.

Used badly, a database will harm the society it is supposed to protect.