UK-Developed 'DNA Spray' Marks Dutch Thieves With Trackable Water

eldavojohn writes "In Rotterdam, there's a new technology in place that dispenses a barely visible mist over those around it and alerts the police. The purpose? To tag robbers and link them back to the scene of the crime. From the article, 'The mist — visible only under ultraviolet light — carries DNA markers particular to the location, enabling the police to match the burglar with the place burgled. Now, a sign on the front door of the McDonald's prominently warns potential thieves of the spray's presence: "You Steal, You're Marked."' Developed in Britain, it's yet to nab a criminal but it will be interesting to see whether or not synthesized DNA will hold up as sufficient evidence in an actual court of law." So it's not just for copper thieves.

Comments

Beware my tiger repellant rock

[pwilli]

"The police acknowledge that they have yet to make an arrest based on the DNA mist, which was developed in Britain by two brothers, one a policeman and the other a chemist. But they credit its presence — and signs posted prominently warning of its use — for what they call a precipitous decline in crime rates (though they could not provide actual figures to back that up).

I don't see any burglars, so it has to be working.

Re:Water?

[Moraelin]

Actually I'd expect it to be even worse, thanks to the CSI effect. Basically the same blind belief that if it's some hi-tech shit, then it's more infallible than the Pope and those scientists 100% thought of and prevented every possible problem or false positive, that you can see in the GP post.

Someone _will_ get sent to jail by some idiot jury because the real burglar -- who, for example, is an employee and didn't even need to synthetise anything: he just nicked the bottle that the PHB cleverly hid in his desk drawer -- sprayed them with it.

That's actually the important part: often when it looks like there's some impossible hurdle like synthetising DNA, there are often _much_ simpler ways to plant it, _and_ you can rely on some idiots still thinking that only the really complicated way exists. E.g., people have already planted DNA at a crime scene by just taking a cigarette butt from a bus station and dropping it there. Here you don't even have to do that.

Or as an even more trivial example, if a co-worker you really don't like leaves his coat behind and his wallet in it, spray the coat and banknotes in the wallet, steal the same amount from the cash register, tip someone off that you saw them stealing again. Double profit. You got the money, and got rid of that guy or gal you don't like.

Yeah, they'll end up having to convince a jury that those scientists and their hi-tech solution are fallible after all. Good luck with that in a world being told the opposite by PR. And where they saw on TV every week that you can take a hair you found on a carpet and know exactly that it belongs to the killer (and not, say, to one of the guests the victim had two days before that, or some guy in the bus leaving hair on her coat) and run a DNA analysis to tell you exactly what the killer looks like. Or that you can take a two by two pixel image of the back of someone's head from a security camera, enhance it to a clear 1600x1200 image and, with a couple more mouse clicks, turn it around to see the culprit's face.

Seriously, we're already at the point where some juries acquit because you didn't do that, or conversely people who spent time on the death row because some pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo must be 100% correct and accurate like on CSI.