Detectives trawl DNA database 60 times a year – hunting for criminals’ relatives
Jason Lewis writes in the Mail on Sunday:
New concerns have been raised about the use of innocent people’s DNA in police investigations.
Figures obtained by The Mail on Sunday show that detectives are ordering weekly searches of the DNA database for people with no immediate connection to any crime.
The searches are used when crime scene DNA samples produce no direct match on the system.
Investigators then trawl millions of other records looking for a partial match, which might indicate that the suspect is related to an innocent person on the system.
The ‘familial DNA searches’ raise new questions about the increasing number of innocent people’s records being held on the DNA register.
This is because a partial match could lead to police launching a background investigation and even a surveillance operation, targeting an innocent person while searching for a family member.
