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Dutch Police Ask 8000+ Citizens To Provide Their DNA
sciencewatcher writes "In an attempt to solve a rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl, the Dutch police have asked 8080 men to provide their DNA. All these people lived 5 km or less from the crime scene at the time of the murder. This reopened cold case is the first large-scale attempt not to hunt the rapist and killer but to locate his close or distant male relatives. All data gathered will be destroyed after the match with this particular murder. There seems to be great public support for this attempt." Shades of The Blooding.
It's clearly for the children.
That is what this boils down to. There is no "right" answer, but citizens of each country answer the question diferently.
"We'll destroy the DNA afterwards, we PROMISE...."
I don't generally like the idea of giving DNA samples to anyone. However, if the authorities are very direct and up-front about it, and provide me with a signed statement that the records will be destroyed after each sample is "cleared", then I'd do it in this case.
I'll always trust the entity who asks for something over the entity which does the same thing in secret without permission.
Even so, I sincerely doubt that this will lead to the perpetrator, for obvious reasons.
why not 6km away, 10km, etc? That is not that large of an area all things considered. It would be roughly the size of a small town. Who is to say the perp didn't live the next town over or was a nomad of sorts. Yes I know they say it is to possibly locate relatives, but how often would close enough match cause them to accuse said match.
Also who would trust their government to "destroy" the data when they are done with it. Yes they may very well destroy the samples but you can bet your next paycheck that it will stay stored on some backup somewhere for future use.
Fortunately, I'm a 6502 man, not an 8080 man. (But then I'm not Dutch either.)
This is a good article on the problems with fishing expeditions like this. Basically, the farther you cast the net, the greater the chance of false positives. What's worse, if there's just one false positive, it becomes next to impossible to argue your innocence because people look at the improbability of a single person being a false positive instead of the probability that there are false positives.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
DNA screening only looks at a few characteristics. Take two random people, and there is about a 1-in-7000 chance that their DNA profiles will match. If you take the DNA profiles of 8000 people, it is quite likely that one of them will match the criminals profile. Meanwhile, the criminal will almost certainly find some way to avoid giving a sample. So you get to put some innocent person through hell, and for what?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Scientists know -- and have been saying -- that DNA is far weaker evidence than prosecutors have tried to paint for the last few decades. But really more to the point: even if a conviction were made, it is not worth the loss of freedom and potential abuse this procedure involves.
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved." -- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, March 14, 1785.
I read this "All data gathered will be destroyed after the match with this particular murder" and immediately think bullshit.
As a rule, once they have this, it never seem to go away.
I would never submit to this unless I was required to -- this is a fishing expedition. Anybody who submits is probably innocent, and anybody who refuses is going to be treated as if they're guilty with something to hide.
Yes, this is terrible. But asking everyone to submit exclusionary DNA because they've ran out of places to look ... well, I find that to be a really scary precedent.
The next step of course would be to just simply have everyone's DNA on file just in case they ever needed it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There is not great public support for this. Outside of that podunk village there's plenty of people, me included, who would go tell the authorities to go fuck themselves. Slippery slope this is. Destroy data? yeah right. They've also said, only after the case has been solved. What if its not solved? And is data ever really destroyed?
On the radio and in the media they're just not playing the sound bites of people who refuse, they're only playing clips of people who say "what's the big deal if you have nothing to hide". The old line secret police everywhere like to use.
I for one will tell the justice department to shove it if they ask me for this.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.