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California Initiative to Expand DNA Database
vervais_sucks writes "A California attorney is personally bankrolling, to the sum of $1.3m, an initiative to require law enforcement to take DNA samples of every person they arrest for a felony." The (lengthy) initiative is available here (search for DNA on the page).
I know someone who's a convicted felon. Want to know what the conviction is for? Graffiti.
That's right, he sprayed graffiti on someone's house when he was 18 and now he's a felon for life. And he gets a DNA sample taken.
How about people with more than $200 of pot on them? People who accidentally cut fiberoptic cables while digging in their backyards?
Do people not realize how idiotic laws are in this country? More than 30 states still consider it a felony to have sex out of wedlock!
Whatever it is I'm complaining about, I'm sure the Republicans did it. This is
The ACLU is doing what they can to slow or stop it.
Here's some informative blog entries:
http://www.jefallbright.net/node/view/1780
http://www.socallawblog.com/archives/001186.html
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
a few years back i was falsely accused of breaking into and thieving half a dozen houses in broad daylight. a felony crime.
well, there i am, at home in my pajamas one morning and a knock at the door. two police officers, one local, one state trooper, ask if they can come in. being completely naive and a bit frightened i let them in.
they tell me that half a dozen homes were robbed in broad daylight and that neighbors said they saw a man fitting my dark complexion driving up and down the street days in advance of the robberies.
i explain (to no avail) to the officers that i had been on that road exactly *once* in my life (the day before) when i accompanied my girlfriend to her friend's home to feed her cat while she was away.
the officers didn't care what i had to say and they proceeded to play good-cop bad-cop and tell some enormous lies about me in the process. one of them asked if he could use my bathroom and then proceeded to case my home.
then they told me that they needed to take my picture and fingerprint all of my fingers. after about one hour they finally left.
after a few weeks had passed (in which i heard nothing from the police) i called the police department to find out what was going on. it took a couple weeks to get through the police bureaucracy, but eventually someone was able to tell me that i was no longer under suspicion.
when i expressed concern about having my picture and fingerprints taken and said i wanted them back i was told that wasn't possible. after expressing my displeasure and complaining to various people in the police department eventually my picture and fingerprints were released to me.
unfortunately, my friend who is a police officer told me that my picture and fingerprints had been scanned and sent to the national FBI database. when i asked him about having them removed from that database he gave me a look that indicated the possibility of that happening was as likely as a cold day in hell.
that experience taught me how easy it is to have your unique unchangeable biometric information stolen and forever stored in government databases just waiting to be abused.
In fact, most forensic DNA work was originally done using RFLP mapping, which doesn't involve sequencing anything at all. Sequencing is relatively recent. Most (all?) of the databases are still based on RFLP.
If you bothered to read the literature, you'd find that there's been a great deal of study of exactly how reliable it is in various circumstances. Also, if you think about it for a minute, you'll realize that there's no a priori reason to care about what percentage of the genome is examined; the question is how much variability there is in the part that is examined. Additional variability in the unexamined parts has nothing to do with the reliability of the test.
A criminologist is a social scientist who deals with the motivations and social contexts of crimes. You are thinking of "criminalists", or "forensic DNA examiners", who are the people who do crime lab work.
I know a lot of these people personally; it so happens that one of my parents was involved in the development of forensic DNA from the beginning. Some of the people I know are involved with things like the Innocence Project. Some of them are private practitioners who typically testify for the defense; if those people have a bias, it's toward clearing people, not toward nailing the innocent.
I have never heard any of them say that they would never use DNA evidence to uniquely identify somebody. Not once.
I have heard many of them say, loudly and repeatedly, that there are circumstances under which they wouldn't use DNA to "finger" anybody, including, but probably not limited to, cases where there's a possibility that a close relative of the suspect was involved, cases where samples were degraded or contaminated. I've never heard them say that they'd never do it. I have heard them say, rather vehemently, that DNA is a lot more reliable than the old serological tests that put a lot of people into prison in the 1970s and 1980s.
Of course, DNA is also more reliable than eyewitnesses, but then almost anything is more reliable than an eyewitness.
No, you can't apply DNA, or any other technique, mechanically, but to say that it's intrinsically unusable is just silly. It's about the most reliable thing out there.
Think about how you're using it.