Arrest Buttle! (Or was it Tuttle?)

nick cowen, 28 February 2008

The Daily Mail reports that one in eight entries on the police’s growing DNA database is incorrectly inputted, threatening to associate the DNA signature of a criminal with the record of an innocent member of the public. In the future innocent people could be arrested on the basis of an error made by a data entry clerk, a possibility imagined before in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil, set in a totalitarian state with an ever-bungling bureaucracy.
The problem is that even if the government could sort out these problems, DNA evidence will never be a magic bullet to save our criminal justice system. Part of why it is so successful at the moment is that it is still a comparatively novel technology that average criminals have yet to learn to exploit. If it comes to be relied on in the majority of cases, dispersing other people’s DNA around a crime scene, in order to put police off the scent, will become much more commonplace and evidence based on it will become just another thing for lawyers and juries to examine, trying to tease out the facts from mere conjecture. To make criminal justice effective, as discussed last week, we need a system that concentrates on reducing crime rather than “managing” offenders.