UK Police Want DNA of 'Potential Offenders'

mrogers writes "British police want to collect DNA samples from children as young as five who 'exhibit behavior indicating they may become criminals in later life'. A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers argued that since some schools already take pupils' fingerprints, the collection and permanent storage of DNA samples was the logical next step. And of course, if anyone argues that branding naughty five-year-olds as lifelong criminals will stigmatize them, the proposed solution will be to take samples from all children."

If they want my DNA...

If they want my DNA, they can bend right over and I'll happily give it to them.

Re:If they want my DNA...

I wouldn't if I were you, you might catch something nasty.

Orwell got the year wrong...

The UK has problems if anyone in power takes this police request seriously. God, I hope it isn't that bad. Five year olds? Do all five year olds who act out become criminals?

Re:Orwell got the year wrong...

Do all five year olds who act out become criminals?

There are five-year-olds who don't act out?

Meeting expectations

When you treat children as criminals, they'll be hard pressed to avoid meeting your expectations.

Re:Meeting expectations

That's the first thing I thought, too. I remember reading about a study someone did on this once. I can't recall all the details, but it went something like this: The researcher went to a classroom of elementary school children and told their teacher that, based on some sort of test, certain children were predispositioned to be intellectual 'bloomers,' whereas others, well, weren't as bright.
 
Well, the test the kids were given to determine their potential was bogus. Who would bloom and who wouldn't were chosen at random. But, at the end of the year, the kids who were supposed to be smart were scoring higher than the others, despite the fact that they were chosen at random. Subtle social forces affected them that much.
 
Moral of the story is to beware of self fulfilling prophecies. If you treat someone like they might be a criminal, they most likely will. And, of course, people will just say that's proof of the program working.
 
Hey, wasn't Einstein a problem child? Didn't work out too bad for him.

Too early for April fools

Is this guy serious?

Pugh admitted that the deeply controversial suggestion raised issues of parental consent, potential stigmatisation and the role of teachers in identifying future offenders, but said society needed an open, mature discussion on how best to tackle crime before it took place

So this guy wants basically wants thoughtcrimes to be illegal. This completely reeks of 1984 and I would hate to see this come true and create a terrible precedent where your DNA is taken at birth and your DNA is examined for "potential markers" of a criminal. I know that is a stretch but who ever thought that this would ever happen, and much less even be suggested? I seriously hope this man gets called out for being his nefarious attitude for society and this suggestion gets tossed into the shitter.

Re:Too early for April fools

If this guy wants to stop criminals before they commit crimes, my suggestion is that they take some money from their obviously over budgeted police force, and invest more into their school system.

We already brand criminals as unemployable

I know someone who was in prison for a non-felony, got a job through a temp agency was a great worker for Amerigas that people enjoyed. When his temp agency stint was up, they were to consider him for an official hire. Problem? Oh he was a criminal once so even though he was a great worker, they fired him, and wouldn't rehire him through the temp agency.

When children are despised

Looking at the UK it's clear why so many of their youth have alcohol problems; hell, why so much of their society does. When a culture shows their young so much disdain and mistrust it's quite clear why this sort of thing happens.
If you grew up with people hating you simply because you're a kid how would you react?

Ever done something stupid ?

I have. It doesn't mean that I am bad or have criminal tendancies.

If you say you have not then you are probably either: utterly boring; or lying.

All this ''record mistakes and label someone for life'' is stupid. It means that huge numbers are regarded as potential crims and becomes useless.

George Orewell was wrong - he chose a date 25 years too early.

There's a greater harm here

This is an outrage. Apart from the obvious and genuine privacy concerns here this would do the very opposite to what the ignorant Gary Pugh is expecting. Hasn't he ever heard of a Self fulling prophecy?

There are many proven psychological reasons [wikipedia.org] why this would cause a vast amount of harm to the development of these children This article [wvu.edu] especially illustrates published studies that showed the effect of positive and negative expectation has on children's academic performance

Fucked up kids?

I'd like to get in before too many people start throwing around the term "1984" as if this had anything but the most tenuous connection to the book 1984. Have any of you actually read the book? Not every erosion of privacy is "1984", you know.

Sigh. Anyway. The matter at hand.

I am a former criminal myself, so this matter hits close to home. When I was in my adolescence, I was arrested for breaking and entering, and there was a lot more I did that I didn't get caught for, of course. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm quite successful now, if I say so myself. In my opinion, there are two major reasons why I'm not dead or in jail right now: the John Howard Society (prisoner's rights organization in the Commonwealth), and the Young Offender's Act (which helps keeps the under-18 out of jail).

Being branded as a "criminal" is a big deal. Through the two entities I just mentioned, I spent less than a day in jail and got mandatory counselling and restitution in lieu. I think one of the biggest factors in me turning my life around is that I wasn't branded for the rest of my life. I don't have a record; I don't have to report myself to neighbours. I'm just a regular citizen. It's quite empowering being a regular, fruitful citizen.

What I'm getting at is, even though I avoided it, I recognize the power of stigma. Even if there aren't any concrete restrictions on these kids, just knowing that you're one of the "bad kids" will fuck you up for life. There's no way these kids aren't going to find out they're one of the "bad kids", and once you're branded, it's a really hard uphill battle to get out of that stigma. Everyone looks at them differently; everyone treats them differently. I wouldn't envy them.

Please, won't somebody think of the children?!

UK is already an Orwellian Society

I currently working on my Masters Thesis, touching, among other things on issues related to totalitarian societies.
Even very quick research shows that Great Britain already resembles the grim visions of '1984', 'Brasil' or 'A Clockwork Orange'.
CCTV is widespread, despite showing little or no effect on stopping crime, its usage is spreading.
Old people are already testing the high-frequency buzzers, to annoy and scare teenagers (it's a prime example of being guilty by default).
A visit to any UK international airport terminal leaves no doubt either - you are a dangerous terrorist until proven otherwise.

And now this, which isn't really new either, just a development on what's been going on for some quite time already.

And worst of all, most UK (or US for that matter) citizens don't seem to mind or care. This is very much reminiscent of a pre-WWII Germany.

I don't mean to sound radical or anything, but remember:
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"

Re:For fuck's sake

No shit. What the fuck is up with the UK these days? The USA is a pit of right wing idiocy, but I always blame it on the fact they're morons from the gitgo. I mean really - that George Bush could be considered a viable candidate indicates that way too many knuckledragging retards live there. So you sort of have to spot the yanks a few right off.

But one would think that the UK, with THOUSANDS of years of experience, and having had their nation bombed and burned by fascists would be a good bit more on top of this kind of thing. But. no. It's like they're saying "Roights? Who needs roights? Cor Blimey - just gimme a pint there guvnah!" sheeesh. Between the jillions of cameras in London, which HAVEN'T really made the city safer, and the constant erosion of human rights and common sense, argh. It's a sad thing to watch.

RS

Re:For fuck's sake

I see a -troll modifier here real quick for you.

that George Bush could be considered a viable candidate indicates that way too many knuckledragging retards live there

Speaking as one of the purported knuckledragging retards, I would like to point out just how many people in the US are fanatically against what is happening here. Even with speaking out and performing civil disobediance, we don't seem to be able to gain any traction, let alone actual forward motion against our government.

The astronomically high level of collusion, complicity, and corruption in the government, the military industrial complex, and special interests makes it nearly impossible to keep our rights from eroding faster and faster.

So you can insult us all you want, but we are just working off the example of the UK with its "thousands of years of experience". Not to compare "our pain", but you did have absolute monarchies in your past and have worked from the ground up for personal liberties. The US started out with the pretense of "liberty for all" and turned it to "power and property for the few".

Maybe instead of taking the time to drag the US in the mud with your name calling, you could use all that energy for some good ol' civil disobediance. Put a burning tire around one of those cameras, sabotage something, anything.

If anything, both of our systems of government are broken irreparably, and need to be tore down with something new put in its place. Of course, that will be awfully hard to do peacefully, which is my greatest fear.

US politics...

a) The US political system is heavily biased towards those who claim to be Christians.

b) There's a demonstrable negative correlation between intelligence and religious belief, for an intelligent person to be a successful politician in the USA they mostly have to lie about their religious beliefs (eg. Pres. Clinton).

Conclusion: The US political system is biased against intelligent, honest people.

Re:For fuck's sake

It makes sense alright. It's just nasty, and probably pointless.

Let me describe a parallel for you.

I used to be a nurse, years ago. After the first year of hospital work it got to the point where I had a very narrow view of society. I mostly saw sick people, so after a while I started to think of everyone outside the hospital in terms of how likely they were to appear in hospital as a result of their behavior or diet. This wasn't a particulerly useful viewpoint, but I still held it.

I realised this, and it took a long time to get past. Not all the nurses I knew managed this.

If your life revolves around dealing with people in a particular state, you tend to become very focused on it. To the police, everyone is viewed in terms of how likely they are to be criminals. They can't help it, our society demands it of them (yes indeed, it does, alas).

I'm more concerned with how much of our taxes this is going to waste before they realise it's pointless.

Re:For fuck's sake

This is what you get when you take the normal human tendency to lose sight of the big picture and apply it to public policy.

I have a friend who is a management consultant. Normally I have not truck with that profession, but he's a really good management consultant, because he's a really good listener. He can listen and listen until you've talked yourself in circles so many times even you realize it. Then he tells you something that would be blindingly obvious to you if you hadn't managed to bury it under tons of mental clutter. In a sense, he specializes in reminding people of the things they shouldn't need a management a consultant to tell them, but somehow they do.

One of his chief themes has to do with confirmation bias. When people are favoring a course of action, the intended consequences of that course of action are very clear to them, sometimes even exaggerated. The unintended consequences tend to be fuzzy, or maybe even invisible.

So imagine you are trying to prevent violent crime. It's a very important job that you take seriously. You have the idea that getting DNA from young children with behavior problems and putting them in a database would prevent some violent crimes. And you're probably right: it would prevent some violent crimes, although you might not be able to quantify how many. But it's a sure bet you aren't considering the bad things that might happen as a result of this, much less quantifying those bad things and putting them into the scales against the good you intend. In fact, where you really go wrong is when you start to think of it, unconsciously of course, in personal terms. People who are pointing out bad things (which you are not prepared to believe) about your plan are trying to stop you from preventing violent crimes. So they must be bad people. Certainly not somebody you'd seriously listen to.

It's childish thinking of course, but are any of us completely above it? Mark Twain once said,"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." But I'd go farther; It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble; it's what you know but are too proud to be reminded of.

First they came for the ...

For some, it's the slippery-slope:
First they collected DNA from sex criminals.
Then they collected DNA from felons.
Then they collected DNA from all criminals.
Then they collected DNA from people who get speeding tickets.
Then they collected DNA from people who drive.
Then they collected DNA from everyone else.

Most people have someone in their family who has a speeding ticket if they don't themselves.

People value their privacy. They want to know that if they get a speeding ticket today, and there is a crime at a restaurant next year, the cup they drank from won't be used as evidence that they were in the restaurant at the time of the crime. What if the guy on the videotape was seen drinking out of a similar glass and he happens to look just like you. You will have been framed by your own DNA.

Re:1984 is here and now.

I make my own foil personally.

Re:And?

Sure you have nothing to hide. You submitted a DNA sample of your neighbor and passed it along as your own. Instead of you have nothing to hide, you are non-existent. A nice prospect to keep below the radar.

Re:And?

Until you realize your neighbor is psychopathic murderer, then you're in trouble.

Re:Well, as Lewis Black would no doubt say ...

Tell me about it. I'm left speechless and weighing two options: going into politics to advocate a fast-track nuclear weapons program with the intent of wiping the UK off the planet before the cancer spreads (too late, I fear) or just buying as big a gun as I can and becoming a hermit in some hole somewhere. The latter option I'm considering because the former is realistically not feasible, although otherwise tempting, and I don't trust this insanity to remain on that island.

If I believed in God, I'd be praying for some serious smiting right about now.

Re:Law & Order

I'll be the first one who is a law & order type of person, but this one scares the crap out of me.

That's probably because this has nothing to do with law and order. This is about totalitarianism, which is a crime.

-jcr