DNA revisited - part 1
.In a recent article, DNA samples from everyone?, I set out why Home Office proposals to extend the DNA database to everyone were wrong. Since then the subject has been in the news because Lord Justice Sedley has suggested that the DNA database should be extended to everyone, including visitors to the country.
The learned judge considered that because DNA taken can be added to and kept upon the database even where someone is innocent of the crime, and because in percentage terms more ethnic minorities have their DNA stored than the population generally, that it would be better to store everyone's. However, whilst recognising that those are legitimate concerns, surely it would be better to address those concerns rather than visit the same problem upon everyone else.
The DNA database started by keeping the DNA of convicted criminals. Gradually police powers to take and retain DNA were extended. First, in respect of relevant charges, from people who are convicted to include those who were acquitted, then to all those charged, (even if not tried) and then to all those arrested even if not charged. It is plainly (as are the new Home Office proposals which seek to extend the relevant charges from those which are stated to be recordable, effectively imprisonable, to every offence under the sun) part of a backdoor attempt to get as close to a national database as possible without calling it such. Lord Justice Sedley, who has been nothing if not frank about his views, presumably thinks that if one is going to surreptitiously creep towards a national database it will be more logical and fairer to actually have one. However a better solution is to prevent the creep towards it.
I am as keen as anyone else to see crime reduced but that balance has to respect essential liberty. We could reduce crime by monitoring people's whereabouts at all times, by issuing lifetime control orders on anyone convicted of an imprisonable offence, or by issuing such control orders on those regarded as genetically or behaviourally predisposed to commit crime. (This might seem like science fiction, but in the last few years both the Metropolitan police and the government have proposed registers of children at risk of turning to crime on behavioural grounds, the police are already searching to see if offenders are related to people who are on the DNA database, and we simply do not know how much more information about a person's potential proclivities might be available from examination of their DNA as scientific advances continue). All these options would rightly be regarded as unacceptable. Just because something might help the fight against crime does not mean that it should automatically be adopted.
DNA of each individual is the recipe for making that human being. It can already tell you a great deal about that person, and it is very likely that in the near future it will be able to tell you a lot more. It is the stuff of each human being, and as private as anything gets. Just as people should be judged on what they have done rather than on what they might do, so a universal compulsory database would be an unwarranted intrusion into the most personal of data.