UK Police Promise Not To Retain DNA Data, But Do Anyway 372
redalien writes "In 2008 I invited two policemen into my home and voluntarily gave them a DNA and fingerprint sample to help with a murder investigation, as they'd promised it would only be used for that investigation. I was never under any suspicion and could just as easily have said no. Almost a year after the investigation closed they have now confirmed that they've retained my samples and at my request have begun an investigation to see if there are sufficient 'exceptional circumstances' to remove them. I'm not the only one who was told samples would be removed, so if you've had such a promise from the police I recommend contacting their data protection registrar immediately."
Not the first (Score:5, Insightful)
You believed them when the promised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously?
Hairdressers (Score:5, Insightful)
I would think you would have more to fear from your barber and a possible black market in DNA traces, for investigative misdirection. Who else might become suspect, doctors, are hospitals removing all samples or are they being put on file as well. Even public transport might be considered an unsafe DNA dispersal risk location.
Condition for Non-Retention (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hairdressers (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're not in the database then you won't need to fear a planted sample either. Not being in the database reduces your risk both from false positive and from planted sample ... being in the database is a pure lose/lose situation.
Re:NEVER talk to the police. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You believed them when the promised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously?
That was exactly the kind of thing I thought!
Unfortunately the police, with the help of politicians, have thrown away any respect I may have once had for them. If the police came to my house, doing door to door enquiries, then I would not talk to them at all, and I most definitely would not invite them into my home.
The police have become servants of themselves, through the target systems that exist to gauge their performance. They do not respect the communities they police any more, and I think most police would actually laugh at you if you told them they are pubic servants.
ACAB.
At this point, if you are nasty fucking pig or a pig apologist, you set the box below to troll, overrated, offtopic, flamebait, or redundant.
govts in disintegration; remember the Duke case (Score:5, Insightful)
So why bother with the free DNA?
Of course, the police and DA everywhere else will cluck their tongues and say this never could happen at their place. Today, only a fool considers government and corporate reps as anything but potentially dangerous adversaries, and their promises as anything more valuable than glib promises printed on second hand toilet paper.
Re:You believed them when the promised? (Score:4, Insightful)
He may have been naive when he did that, but if UK police force is not up to his expectations with that regard, the blame is still with the police, and that's where things should be fixed.
If you don't trust policemen in your country, same logic applies. Why do you give guns (and the discretion to use lethal force) to people who aren't trusted with much more mundane things?
Animal House (Score:4, Insightful)
A line from National Lampoon's Animal House came to my mind first thing:
"You can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You fucked up... you trusted us!"
I mean really - how could this guy possibly have expected them do drop something as useful* as a DNA fingerprint?
* useful in this context means "everyone is a suspect which makes my job easier as a cop"
Re:Do not cooperate with the police (Score:3, Insightful)
That is a laughably simplistic question.
It would be much more like: ...
LEO: "Have you seen this little girl?"
You: "No".
LEO: "Where were you around this and that time?"
You: "Alone, here in the house."
LEO: "Can anybody confirm that?"
You:
Do you see what I mean? What looks like a simple question, could actually turn into an unpleasant conversation of which your lawyer would tell you to stop explaining yourself.
Re:Hairdressers (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not the first (Score:5, Insightful)
He could have spotted the lie just as soon as they promised him the samples would be removed. Almost everybody on /. knows that it is almost impossible to delete data from fail-over sites, backups, archived data, etc. in a way that one can guarantee that all traces of the data has really been destroyed everywhere...
Re:WAIVE NOTHING..EVER..EVER!! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you talk to the police without consul, during an investigation you have waived your rights and demonstrated to the police that you are an idiot, not honest or friendly.
Bullshit. You just make it harder for them to do their job. Sure there are cops who are crooks, or just jerks, but if you presume that they all are then you are no better than your make-believe stereotypical policeman. Have a think about which dark corner of society would benefit if everyone starts being hostile towards the police.
We had a policeman knock on our door a while back. There was a grassfire a few km down the road and a car vaguely fitting the description of our car parked in our driveway was seen leaving the scene. By the time he knocked on our door I assumed he had already put his hand on the bonnet etc to see if had been driven recently, and he even told us that our car didn't really match the description after all. We chatted for a while and he left. If i'd had behaved like a prick like you suggest what would it have gained me?
I can only begin to guess at what a horrible job it must be most of the time. You'd see the worst of people every day. You'd have to knock on doors at 3am and tell parents that they have one less living child. Every time you pull someone over you know that there is a slim chance that someone's going to pull a shotgun on you. And if you make it hard for them to do their job then the only people left doing the job are the ones who don't take your sort of shit lightly.
Hopefully if you ever need the assistance of the police, you won't run into one that you've pissed off along the way.
Re:WAIVE NOTHING..EVER..EVER!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. You just make it harder for them to do their job.
The only time the police have an easy job is in a police state.
If you're not a criminal, victim or witness then you have no reason to talk to the police about a crime, and if you are a criminal then you have no reason to talk to the police without a lawyer. So there are very, very few cases where talking to the police is actually beneficial, and many where it's going to get you in a world of hurt... even police themselves will admit that.
Remember, these are the people who recently shot an innocent guy in the head eight times for 'suspicion of looking a bit muslim' and walked away with no consequences. Britain is rapidly approaching a police state if it isn't already there, which is precisely why I left a couple of years ago.
Re:Not the first (Score:5, Insightful)
Police are allowed to participate in a ruse to gain the trust of a suspect.
Make no mistake. You were a suspect in a murder case, until cleared. In a police investigation, everyone is a potential suspect. As such, be careful what you volunteer, because until proven otherwise, you are a suspect and can be lied to.
Don't give a Sample (Score:5, Insightful)
How the hell could it "help with a murder investigation" to provide them with a sample of your DNA?
Presuming you are innocent, you are simply opening yourself up to a false positive match, either now or in sometime in the future.
You have everything to lose, and nothing whatsoever to gain.
In the case of a degraded DNA sample, it's possible to have the statical odds of you being a match for a sample in the range of 100,000 to 1. That doesn't seem so bad unless you consider that there might be 1,000,000 records on file. Statistically that's 10 database hits, and if you are the lucky one cold hit, combined with the apparent belief that juries find scientific evidence infallible, you could easily be convicted. It *has* happened before that the only evidence that links a suspect to a crime is a cold database hit.
Just don't give them a sample without a court order, ever.
British police (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course you were under suspicion! (Score:4, Insightful)
In 2008 I invited two policemen into my home and voluntarily gave them a DNA and fingerprint sample to help with a murder investigation, as they'd promised it would only be used for that investigation. I was never under any suspicion...
Of course you were under suspicion - they just didn't have enough evidence to get a warrant to force you to give up your DNA so they bamboozled you into doing it voluntarily. Of course they kept it on file, they were suspicous enough of you to request a DNA sample thus you are under permanent suspicion for the rest of your life and probably a ways beyond.
What you did was the equivalent of getting pulled over by a cop and when he looks in your car window and doesn't see anything to justify a search , instead of letting you go on your way, he asks you if he can go ahead and search your car anyway and you said yes.
voluntarily gave them a DNA and fingerprint sample (Score:1, Insightful)
Why would you do that? You know that you didn't do it, don't you? You could save them the price of analyzing your DNA by not giving a sample, and apparently there are other benefits of not participating in mass screenings...
Re:Not the first (Score:3, Insightful)
On the not so bright side, this won't stop the police from turning your life upside down if you happen to be unlucky enough to match someone else in their database - and I speculate that much of what you describe is not terribly well known to the lay person, which would mean that without a hell of a good alibi it could still be enough to get you convicted.
Re:Not the first (Score:4, Insightful)
On the bright side there is an increasing consensus that DNA evidence is a lot less useful than CSI: would have us believe.
No, that isn't the bright side, and you misunderstand the meaning of "useful" as far as DNA databasing is concerned. As long as the jury believes all that CSI stuff, DNA evidence is just as useful as everyone thinks for getting a conviction, getting the case closed, and making the police's detection statistics look good. The DNA evidence might not be so useful for getting the right person convicted, but that doesn't appear in anybody's performance indicators so that doesn't matter to anybody. Except to the poor sucker put away for a crime they didn't commit, but they're a convict now and nobody cares what they think.
Don't Talk To The Police (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not the first (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:British police (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmmm
I don't believe the blame can be (entirely) placed on the Labour Government, I did not trust the police before Labour came to power. There are numerous examples of the police abusing their powers under previous governments.
It doesn't matter for a different reason (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't matter for a different reason: if the majority are decent and honest, why do they close ranks and defend the corrupt minority? They're not being part of the solution, they're part of the problem.
Where have you been? (Score:1, Insightful)
Where has the original OP [b]been[/b]? Stories about the "DNA Database" have been plastered all over the news and related sites such as The Register (UK) for months. Here's some examples;
[url]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/04/dna_pioneer_lambasts_database/[/url]
[quote]"Currently, everybody arrested in England and Wales has to provide a DNA sample, and the government has been heavily criticised for retaining profiles of people not charged or found innocent. The European Court of Human Rights ruled against the policy of indefinite retention in late 2008."[/quote]
[url]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/21/dna_pnc/[/url]
[quote]Police will continue to retain the personal details of everyone they arrest, despite a human rights ruling meaning the DNA profiles they are linked to must be deleted."[/quote]
You can't be [b]that[/b] bothered about his DNA retention, after all you gave it up voluntarily without even being a suspect and without knowing the laws or what the police would do with it!
Re:Don't give a Sample (Score:4, Insightful)
How the hell could it "help with a murder investigation" to provide them with a sample of your DNA?
If it happened in your home and your DNA is contaminating the crime scene. They have multiple samples of DNA and would like to eliminate some. I wouldn't want to trust the police with my DNA either, but if my wife was murdered in our bed (while I had an airtight alibi), it'd be a hard problem but I'd want a lawyer first.
Re:British police (Score:3, Insightful)
This [wikipedia.org] is what killed my trust in the English police: an old-Etonian Earl and ITN (Britain's independent TV news agency) condemning the disproportionate actions of the police against women and children.
I don't trust New Labour to prevent atrocities like this, but this particular one took place under the Conservatives. And it wasn't [wikipedia.org] an isolated incident.
Back on topic, I believe "UK police" here really means "English and Welsh police": I *believe* one of the few things the Scottish "polis" get right is that they don't retain DNA evidence unlawfully. Or at least they haven't been caught yet.
Re:You believed them when the promised? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, but it's worse - catching someone for speeding gets you the same number of points as solving a rape or a murder. Not only that, but it also generates government revenue.
Where do you think the police solve the most crimes then ?
Re:Not the first (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Freedom is a lie (Score:3, Insightful)
No, he isn't. Speaking as another former Soviet citizen I can attest that in some things people were more free there, especially in the eighties. Stalin died in 1953, you know.
Re:You believed them when the promised? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the thing - while the submission may be voluntary, there are numerous little ways in which the police can make your life uncomfortable if you fail to comply. Nobody wants to turn up at work with a police tail, for instance, or have an officer drag you off for questioning in front of all your friends and family at a gathering such as a wedding, or even to be picked up on every petty little violation - 1mph over the speed limit? You're coming with us, son.
Of course, the stock response is always "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about", which is patently absurd. On the most basic level it neglects to consider false positive DNA matches (which become incresingly likely the more of the population are in the database), that's without even considering the much more serious possibility of accidental or even deliberate cross contamination.
Re:Not the first (Score:4, Insightful)
Studies have been done on small sections of some DNA databases, comparing every profile with every other profile, and found this to simply be false. In Arizona 65 493 profiles were made available - 122 pairs matched at nine loci, 20 at ten, 1 at eleven and 1 more at twelve. In Illinois 220 000 were checked, and 903 pairs matched at nine or more loci, and in Maryland 30 000 were checked, providing 32 matching pairs.
Add to this the problem that eyelashes, skin fragments etc can be carried on the wind, or from a random frottage, and we have some important cases being 'solved' with what amounts to deeply circumstantial evidence. With any luck this fascination with DNA being used as the be all and end all, the assayer of truth, will end as soon as possible.
You say all this as if the police walk into a crime scene having absolutely no clue who the perpetrator could possibly be, taking some DNA samples, running it through the computer, then arresting the resultant match and passing it on to the courts. In reality the list of suspects is going to be considerably narrowed by old-fashioned police work: finding witnesses, finding out the victim's history, looking for motive, etc.
In other words, fat lot of good it's going to do you to claim, "But there's a 0.1% chance that DNA isn't mine!" when you've been spotted leaving the crime scene by a witness, were seen having an argument with the victim a couple days prior, he owed you money, etc. Not to mention that if you go to find those other, say, 30 DNA matches, you find out that 21 of them live hundreds of miles away, 3 of them are in nursing homes, 1 is a kid, 2 are already in prison and have been for years...
OMG! Say it ain't So! (Score:3, Insightful)
Cops lie! Film at 11.
In other news, the sun rises in the east, all operating systems suck, and a popular household baby food contains rat poison. Tune in after "House, M.D." to find out which one!
Re:Animal House (Score:3, Insightful)
Boy, are you in trouble, buddy.
Re:Not the first (Score:3, Insightful)
Those four words alone could possibly trump any attempt to show a person's innocense by so-called "witnesses" to the person's whereabouts. It's the new "the computer says it, so it must be true"!
Re:Animal House (Score:2, Insightful)
Now that they have your DNA, they can make copies of it and frame your ass for a crime you didn't commit! It's technically possible now, and just going to get easier, cheaper and quicker. So much easier than actually, you know, like, solving crimes.
HA! You think they want to solve crimes.
Re:Not the first (Score:3, Insightful)
Short of the DNA being fabricated, or having been contaminated in such a way that would be non-obvious and still lead to matching candidates X, Y and Z... ...are you saying it does lie?
Nobody worth a damn uses, or should use, "The DNA profile matches this random man we plucked off the streets, therefore he did it."
Put differently... say your DNA was on record for whatever reason or non-reason. Now they find some manner of DNA sample where its profile matches yours. Are you now saying that the hard facts that a DNA sample with a profile matching yours are a lie?
It either matches or it doesn't. There's no 'lying' involved there. You would be perfectly well to point out - perhaps citing the aforementioned data - that the DNA sample not only matches you, but a dozen other people as well. You could even suggest that the sample, if in fact a perfect match for yours if such were possible, could have gotten there by some other means - the wind carrying one of your hairs over there - including planting.
But there's no 'lie' in it matching or not - have a lab of your own choice run a DNA matching test. If they come up with a 'no match'.. *then* you can start pondering a lie.. but not a lie of the DNA but a lie of either of the labs / those who write up the official testing results / etc.
In gross perversions of justice, yes. Do gross perversions of justice happen? Sure. It's a trade-off we make. We send homicidal maniacs back into society because there's some 'reasonable doubt', and we send innocent people off to the slammer because all sorts of evidence points to them, and for whatever reason they've got nothing to counter it with to -cause- a reasonable doubt.
But in any sane court case, just a "we found DNA, extracted a profile, and it matches this guy - we have no further evidence, we have no opportunity, no motive, no means, the guy lives 1500 miles away, he's on CCTV footage of an ATM machine by a bank just 30 minutes before the crime was committed and a bunch of coworkers and a bartender claiming he was in a bar having drinks there until at least 3 hours after the murder, but gosh darnit we have DNA!!!" isn't gonna cut it.