Don’t take away the modern copper’s toolkit
Sean O’Neill writes in The Times:
The same voices that sow alarm over DNA also complain loudly about the spread of the “surveillance society”. They fret about the rising number of CCTV cameras, quoting the guesstimate of 4.2 million cameras as fact.
And they stoke up fear over proposals to create a central log of mobile phone and e-mail traffic, something that law enforcement refers to as the intercept modernisation programme but which has become better known as the “Big Brother database”.
These battles being fought (and won) under the banner of liberty and privacy threaten to have serious consequences in terms of the ability of the police to investigate serious crime. If we curtail the use of DNA, slash the number of CCTV cameras and abandon the collation of phone and e-mail records then we are asking detectives to try to catch the most dangerous criminals with one hand tied behind their backs.
November 25th, 2009 at 18:43
As so often, the key to an unbalanced article is to be found right at the end – in the author’s affiliation. In this case, “Sean O’Neill is crime and security editor [of The Times]“.
Hmmmmmmmm. So a man with a well-paid, prestigious editor’s job – which he would lose in short order if the police did not confide in him – sympathises with the police and their views?
Astonishing.
November 26th, 2009 at 14:19
“one hand tied behind their backs” – gosh, they really must be good to have caught all those bad guys over the last 300 years or so!
November 26th, 2009 at 22:30
The “one hand tied behind their backs” comment is pure hyperbole.
Firstly, only about 0.37% of recorded crimes involve DNA detections (and many of those involve other types of evidence as well). No-one is proposing completely stopping the police using DNA evidence, but even if this were to happen, the clear-up rate would drop by 0.37 percentage points at most – and probably by much less, since cases with DNA evidence often also have other types too.
Secondly, putting almost 1 million innocent people on the database hasn’t improved its effectiveness as a crime-fighting tool one jot. Before 2004 only samples from those charged with offences were held, but since then anyone arrested in England and Wales has had their DNA permanently added, even if never charged or convicted. However, despite hundreds of thousands of DNA profiles being retained since 2004 that would otherwise have been deleted, the DNA detection rate has stayed stubbornly constant at 0.37% since 2002. The inescapable conclusion is that retaining the samples of the innocent isn’t helping solve more crime. All those innocent people’s samples could be deleted without reducing the database’s effectiveness at all.
For more data, see Genewatch’s careful analyses, especially “Would 114 murderers have walked away if innocent people’s records were removed from the National DNA Database?”, http://tinyurl.com/6xne7a