IT was something of a shock to learn back in January 2006 that Britain has the largest DNA database of its citizens in the world, according to figures obtained from the Home Office. It was admitted that some 3 million people were on the UK National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database (around 5 per cent of the entire population), a figure expected to rise to 4.25 million, or one in 14, by 2008. What was most disconcerting, however, was the revelation that in 2005 113,000 people arrested but not charged with a crime were added to the database. The total in of such individuals back in January stood at 139,263, with a further 200,000 of those on the database being charged but not prosecuted.
However, revised figures quietly released on 11/12/06 have painted a rather different, and far more sinister, picture. The Home Office now claims that almost one in three of the 3,457,000 individuals genetically catalogued at present do not have a criminal conviction. In a parliamentary answer ministers admitted only 2,317,555 of those registered had a criminal conviction or caution registered on the Police National Computer. This startling admission arrived shortly after a survey of countries by the Privacy International Group chillingly described modern Britain as a society living under 'endemic surveillance,' comparable to that Russia of China, where there has been 'a systematic failure of legal mechanisms to protect us against the emerging surveillance society.'
Now, it must be asserted that issue is not being taken with DNA and its employment in the detection or prevention of crime; indeed these details have been used to good effect in the apprehension of countless murderers and rapists (in 2005 the crime detection rate was 26 per cent, rising to 40 percent where DNA evidence existed) and, of course, DNA is also a potent ally in the case for the reintroduction of capital Punishment, but despite this a national database which contains the genetic details of those wrongfully arrested is some cause for concern. Why not simply destroy the details of those 1,139,445 unfortunates who were not charged or found not guilty at trial? In November Professor Alec Jeffreys, a geneticist who played a leading role in pioneering the use of DNA profiling in the UK, voiced his concerns over the database, commenting: 'When the database was initially established it was for DNA from criminals so that if they reoffended they could be picked up. There are now hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent people populating that database.'
Prior to 2001 the police were only permitted to take samples of those actually charged with a crime and if they were subsequently found innocent or the charges were dropped the sample would be duly destroyed. However, in the aforementioned year the passing of the Criminal Justice and Police Act meant that such sensitive and private information did not have to be destroyed even in the event of a non-conviction, and in April 2004 the Criminal Justice Act came into force (being passed on 22/03/03, the second day of the Iraq War) expanding this so that anybody arrested could be swabbed and their details end up on the national database. This of course conforms precisely to the government's deluded presumption that everybody is a potential law-breaker (remember that according to socialist dogma criminality is the logical consequence of economic deprivation, and not of any moral failing) and that, accordingly, we should all be treated as suspects.
Even in the hands of a conscientious, responsible government the stockpiling of such sensitive personal information would be disconcerting enough, but in the hands of our current regime - one chiefly characterised by its almost complete lack of moral and ethical scruples and which displays an excessive interest in the private affairs of its citizens and with persecuting any who vocally oppose their creepy socialist orthodoxy - it is positively terrifying. Regarding the January figures Mr Philip Booth of NO2ID commented that, 'There are all sorts of ways in which this could be commercially usable. When government spending spirals out of control, what is to stop them from selling the data to recoup some of the losses?'
PostScript: When the figures were disclosed in January the revelations also opened another can of worms: that of race and criminality. Apparently the DNA profiles of around 37 per cent of all black males in the UK are on the database, compared to 13 per cent of Asian males and a mere 9 per cent of white males. Naturally the leftist media howled that this disproportion was the result of policing bias against minority ethnic groups, just as they habitually condemn those countless crime statistics released by the Home Office which document the ethnicity of offenders and which consistently expose the pronounced involvement of black men (and, to a lesser degree, Asian men) in criminal behaviour. As then Home Secretary Jack Straw said back in 2001: 'A higher proportion of black people commit street crime. That's a fact.' Get over it.
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