Public opinion sought on DNA database

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics will question whether current laws allowing police to take, store and analyse the DNA of suspects, witnesses and victims should be revised.

The consultation will aim “to identify and consider the ethical, social and legal issues raised by current and potential future uses of bioinformation for forensic purposes.”

Doctor Carole McCartney, lecturer in criminal law at the University of Leeds, is managing the project and said the core of the problem is that the public “have not yet fully debated the issues”. It comes after Tony Blair’s recent visit to the Forensic Science Service (FSS) where he publicly announced that “the public back the national DNA database”.

Contrary to the Prime Minister’s comments, Dr McCartney told Police Professional: “But the Home Affairs Select Committee on Science and Technology argues that ‘we don’t know if the public back this, we haven’t asked them’.”

Issues that repeatedly come under the spotlight will be discussed by a working group, which consists of members with expertise in law, genetics, philosophy and social science.

Dr McCartney said: “The Nuffield Council are of the opinion that it has now reached a point where it is becoming a serious issue. People are raising issues about children and innocent people being added, who is accessing the information and for what reasons, and where was the public debate?”

The national DNA database Custodian Unit are formulating an ethical framework around the national database and how they make decisions about access and research using data on the database and the DNA samples. The discussion paper, to be published by the Nuffield Council in autumn 2007, will feed into the building of such an ethical framework.

“In terms of policy impact, it really depends on what our conclusions are at the end and what our recommendations will be and whether anyone in government is willing to listen,” said Dr McCartney.

The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) point to the estimated 135,000 black men aged 15-34 who will be on the database by April 2007, equivalent to 77 per cent of the young male black population of England and Wales.

A spokesperson for the CRE said: “We see race disproportionality as race inequality, which concerns us unless it can be justified. The database currently reflects anyone arrested, with a 4:1 disproportionality for black males rather than those convicted. So in other words, the extreme disproportionality on the database reflects the racial pattern of those who are initially suspected, not those who are ultimately found guilty.

“A compulsory universal database would represent race equality in principle but in practice it would depend on whose data was used and in which ways.”

Dr McCartney added: “All citizens should share the same amount of risk and there exists an obvious differentiation between somebody being on the database and somebody who isn’t. As we are seeing now, the database is continuing to build up, but not in a representative fashion. Some citizens are being put on the database because of other issues to do with policing such as the operation of stop and search powers.”

This implies that the database isn’t impacting equally on everybody in society and leads to the argument that people prefer, perhaps, to have a universal database, which has been suggested, and that is one thing the Council are looking into.

This raises parallels with America, explained Dr McCartney, where the arrest population “is even more skewed than ours”.

“They are building up databases of young black males in America; they are very aware of the fact that this may be used for racial profiling and that it could inevitably fuel prejudices about who is committing crime in society. If a database is predominantly made up of people from ethnic minorities, that can exacerbate any preconceptions about who is committing crime. The public still have, I believe, the understanding that the database is o