Bending the rules?

It has been reported that police are arresting people with the objective of adding DNA samples to the national database. The Human Genetics Commission has recently added its criticism of the practice.

Given the difficulty of having your DNA removed from the database when your innocence is established, this is a serious escalation. The estimate is that of the 5 million profiles presently on the database, perhaps as many as 1 million are innocent and should not be there.

It goes right to the heart of whole idea of such a database. A few serious offences have been "solved" by use of the database, but there are questions about what general contribution it has made.

If an offender is deemed to have "paid his price" to society when his punishment is over, he will be punished by his record in any case. Is he to be further punished for the rest of his life by being on the register? If some innocent people are on the database, is there a case to require all citizens to be on the database, perhaps with the DNA to be taken at birth?

DNA technology has come a long way, but it is not without problems, and can make for "lazy" policing and the charging with offences of people for whom their DNA was there for entirely innocent reasons, or even because of mistakes in taking samples or recording profiles.