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  Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information UK, a division of Reed Elsevier,
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                               New Scientist

                                May 5, 2001

SECTION: This Week: Special Report - The DNA Police, Pg. 1010

LENGTH: 1798 words

HEADLINE: Could it be you ?

BYLINE: David Concar

What Britain's DNA testing laws will mean for innocent people

BODY:

IN THE US, it would be protected by steel doors and armed guards. In
Britain, anonymity does the job. Tucked away on an industrial estate near
Birmingham, you'd scarcely know the brick-and-glass building was there - let
alone that it houses the biggest collection of human DNA in the world. A
collection that's getting bigger - and more contentious - by the day.

For years, police in Britain have been quietly exercising their right to
collect saliva swabs from almost anyone they take into custody. Those swabs
now fill scores of industrial freezers in the basement of the
anonymous-looking building. Upstairs, a database holds over a million DNA
profiles based on these samples. And because crime never stops, up to 3000
new samples arrive every day.

On the streets of LA or New York the cops might have more firepower. But
it's in Britain, land of the unarmed bobby on the beat, where the brave new
world of the "DNA police" is taking shape. And if Tony Blair and his
colleagues have their way, it'll take shape sooner than most people
realise.Magazine The British government wants to treble the number of DNA
samples police take and expand the criminal database to 3.5 million samples
over the next three years. That means the police will hold the DNA profile
of nearly 1 out of every 15 people in Britain.

To hit this target, the government is giving the police unprecedented powers
to collect and keep DNA samples from suspects - even if they turn out to be
innocent. The necessary Criminal Justice and Police Bill is being considered
by Parliament right now. Police chiefs are ecstatic. Civil rights advocates
see it as unparalleled threat to privacy. But most people in Britain seem to
be sleepwalking through the debate.

Now could be the time to wake up. "New Scientist" has found that forensic
experts - the people you'd expect to be most in favour - are actually uneasy
about the proposal to retain DNA samples. Even the inventor of DNA
fingerprinting is alarmed. "I'm totally opposed," says Alec Jeffreys of the
University of Leicester. "It's discriminating, inconsistent with privacy
laws and an example of ad hoc sloppy thinking."

There's no doubt DNA evidence is transforming police work - and mostly for
the better. All detectives need do is find a single hair, speck of blood or
even a flake of dandruff at a crime scene. Then, after the few hours it
takes for analysis, they can trawl the database for matching DNA.

Often with stunning success. Since 1995, more than 100,000 links between
people and crime scenes have popped out of the computer. Every week, it
delivers 800 more. And it's no longer just murderers or rapists who have to
worry. In Britain these days, nearly 90 per cent of all DNA matches are for
burglaries, robberies and car theft.

Increasingly, there is nowhere for criminals to hide, as Stephen Snowden
found out when he was arrested for stealing a bottle of whisky from a
British supermarket. DNA testing linked him to the rape, years earlier, of a
woman whose car broke down. Stealing the whisky led to a 12-year sentence
for rape.

So routinely "swabbing" everyone taken into custody can pay off bigtime. It
is what happens to the samples and profiles afterwards that disturbs
critics. Other countries with a criminal DNA database destroy them if the
suspect is cleared. Uniquely, the British government intends to keep them
indefinitely, regardless of the outcome. So the DNA profiles of thousands of
innocent people will end up on the criminal database.

"It goes against fundamental principles of justice," says David Balding, a
geneticist at the University of Reading who helped expose early statistical
problems with DNA fingerprinting. "If you're acquitted or found not guilty,
you shouldn't have to pay any kind of penalty, no matter how small."

But what is the penalty ? As Britain's Home Office likes to point out, if
you are an innocent, law-abiding person, why should you worry about having
your DNA profile scanned in the nightly trawl for criminals ?

One reason is that being on a database of potential offenders regularly
searched by the police puts you at risk of being wrongly accused of crimes.
The risk of two people having the same DNA profile is nowhere near as great
as it once was, thanks to technical advances - but it can happen. Raymond
Easton, a builder from Swindon, gave a DNA sample in 1995 after a minor
domestic incident. Three years later, he became the prime suspect for a
burglary after the forensic computer matched his profile to a drop of blood
from the crime scene. By this time, Easton was suffering from Parkinson's
disease and had trouble dressing himself.

The match was based on an analysis of six regions of the DNA found at the
crime scene. There was only a 1 in 37 million chance of another person
matching in each of the six regions. Unfortunately, Easton was that person.
In 1999, a more powerful test based on 10 regions of his DNA cleared him.
The episode so rattled Britain's Forensic Science Service that they
immediately made the more expensive 10-region test standard.

This has shrunk the risk of a chance match to one in a billion. But the
possibility of a rogue result hasn't vanished altogether. "There's always
the possibility of error, even with the 10-point match," says Robert
Forrest, a forensic toxicologist at the University of Sheffield. "The tests
are carried out by humans, and humans are prone to error."

Humans are also prone to shedding bits of themselves wherever they go -
creating more possibilities for wrongful suspicion. As few as 50 cells - the
number you might shed brushing the back of your hand against a glass door -
can yield a genetic fingerprint. And soon a single cell might be enough.

"As the tests become more sensitive, there's a greater chance of picking up
innocent contact at a crime scene," says Adrian Linacre, a forensics expert
at the University of Strathclyde. A stray hair or cigarette butt dropped by
an innocent person might bring them under suspicion if they are on the
database.

A bigger concern is what happens to the stored DNA samples and profiles in
the future. Who will have access to them and the information they contain ?

A DNA profile is just a string of numbers stored on a computer (see below).
In theory it contains no more information about you than the number on your
driving licence. But the samples in the freezer contain all your genetic
secrets. Scientists might one day be able to return and extract detailed
information about your appearance, health and even your behaviour.

It is already possible to test crime scene DNA to see if the offender has
red hair. In future, police might want to know about height, skin colour or
even any unusual medical conditions. Britain's national DNA database would
be an ideal place to go trawling for the genetic markers needed to develop
such biological "photofits".

And crucially, if someone does attempt to use the database for this purpose,
the DNA donors will be unable to object. "One of the principles of research
is that you can withdraw consent from a project," says Forrest. "Here you
can't withdraw consent."

Forrest also worries the huge emphasis being placed on DNA evidence will
tempt police to arrest people on trumped-up minor charges just to get a DNA
sample. That, say some, would take us perilously close to random DNA
sampling on the streets. Indeed, efforts are already underway to develop
handheld DNA profilers.

The government rejects this as paranoia, and claims that current laws make
it illegal to use the database for anything other than identifying suspects.
But laws can always be ignored - and have been. When the national database
was set up in 1995, samples and profiles were supposed to be destroyed if
suspects were cleared. That hasn't been happening. Last year, an internal
government report estimated that up to 80,000 samples and profiles were
being retained illegally.

Even the government's own advisers fear the worst. According to Britain's
Data Protection Act, anyone who volunteers biological samples for a database
has the right at a later date to ask for the sample and corresponding record
to be destroyed. The new legislation specifically removes that right, says
Jonathan Bamford, assistant commissioner of the Data Protection Commission.

Bamford thinks the onus should be on the police to prove the benefits of
keeping DNA records of innocent people. "If there are no matches, what is
the purpose of keeping the sample and record ?"

To deter people from committing more serious offences, perhaps. "There's no
evidence that DNA records act as a deterrent," says Forrest. "They are just
as likely to lead to more forensically aware offenders. You'll use a condom
next time you rape, or wear a disposable boiler suit." Indeed, one sex
offender caught recently was found to have shaved off all his body hair,
trimmed his nails and even plucked his nostril hairs.

So if not for deterrence, why do the authorities want to keep all the
records ? Easy, says Alec Jeffreys. Deep down they believe that innocent
people who've had a brush with the law are more likely than not to be
criminals. According to Jeffreys, there is only one way to prevent any abuse
of the DNA samples - destroy them all after a DNA profile has been obtained.
Currently, the police rely on going back to the samples to check any matches
- a practice Jeffreys regards as suspect. Any checking of results, he says,
should be carried out on a fresh sample obtained from the suspect.

What alarms him most, though, is the unfairness of lumping together innocent
people and criminals. Suspects who are cleared should have the right to
remove their DNA profiles, he says. Or, more radically, the database should
contain everyone's DNA profile, filed at birth.

That prospect will appal many civil rights campaigners. But according to
Jeffreys, it is fairer than what is being proposed. If you keep the DNA
profiles of some innocent people, he says, you ought to keep them all.

What is a DNA profile ?

The end result of DNA profiling is a set of two numbers showing the number
of repeats in each copy of a particular marker. In the simplified example
shown, it would be 3 4. The profiles stored in Britain's National DNA
Database are actually based on 10 different repeat regions, plus a sex
marker. So a real profile of a man would be something like: 17 17; 14 17; 11
12; 16 17; XY; 13 14; 30 31; 11 23; 14 15; 7 8; 21 23. In addition, each
entry in the database includes a person's name, their date of birth, sex and
ethnicity. Other details such as the police force involved and an arrest
summons number are also included.

For more science news see http://www.newscientist.com

LOAD-DATE: May 4, 2001