Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Local Police Departments Are Building Their Own DNA Databases (ap.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the cops-vs-chromosomes dept.

Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes the Associated Press: Dozens of police departments around the U.S. are amassing their own DNA databases to track criminals, a move critics say is a way around regulations governing state and national databases that restrict who can provide genetic samples and how long that information is held. The local agencies create the rules for their databases, in some cases allowing samples to be taken from children or from people never arrested for a crime. Police chiefs say having their own collections helps them solve cases faster because they can avoid the backlogs that plague state and federal repositories...

Frederick Harran, the public safety director in Bensalem Township, Pennsylvania...said he knows of about 60 departments using local databases... "The local databases have very, very little regulations and very few limits, and the law just hasn't caught up to them," said Jason Kreig, a law professor at the University of Arizona who has studied the issue.
One ACLU attorney cites a case where local police officers in California took DNA samples from children without even obtaining a court order first.

50 comments

  1. Forget it? Unlikely by markdavis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    >"state and national databases that restrict who can provide genetic samples and how long that information is held."

    If you really believe that the government actually completely lets go (forgets/purges) DNA information it collects, I have some nice swamp land for sale in Florida...

  2. Re:TRUMP DNA by dougdonovan · · Score: 1

    Local Police Departments Are Building Their Own DNA Databases...ok, good luck.

  3. Re:Forget it? Unlikely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Wait, but there really is nice swamp land in FL. Don't you mean in the desert or something?

  4. First Glance by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Funny

    At first glance I read this as "Lego police departments..."

    Like wow, talk about a left-wing Lego set! Shades of the Playmobil TSA playset, eh?

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    1. Re:First Glance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My Lego sets were always located at the right wing of the department store, where the kid's section was, you insensitive Lego brick!

  5. Pretty sure he means... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    He has a nice swamp in D.C. to sell you as the officially bonded agent of Trump Real Estate Holdings LLC. :)

    1. Re:Pretty sure he means... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh! That answer was priceless! They should put a sign in front of the White House. Swampland for sale! Comes with gators.

    2. Re:Pretty sure he means... by Agripa · · Score: 1

      Can we replace D.C. with a swamp? It was a swamp before so restoration should be relatively easy.

  6. Re:Forget it? Unlikely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You have no idea what the express means, don't you...

  7. Re:Forget it? Unlikely by rmdingler · · Score: 2

    >"state and national databases that restrict who can provide genetic samples and how long that information is held."

    If you really believe that the government actually completely lets go (forgets/purges) DNA information it collects, I have some nice swamp land for sale in Florida...

    Now that the storage of such data is trivial, it simultaneously unleashes the potential for great advancements and great abuses.

    The best weapon we still wield against the most egregious abuses is the freedom to disseminate sketchy practices such as this, and to demand some accountability. Law enforcement is a necessary, often thankless job. My hat's off to those who keep the peace, but, if left to the police, the Police State is inevitable.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

  8. Fix'd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Dozens of police departments around the U.S. are amassing their own DNA databases to track *everyone*

    1. Re:Fix'd by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 2

      Dozens of police departments around the U.S. are amassing their own DNA databases to track *everyone*

      Actually, it should be "Dozens of police departments around the U.S. are amassing their own DNA databases to track everyone stupid enough not to say "get a warrant."

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    2. Re:Fix'd by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      everyone stupid enough not to say "get a warrant."

      1. They are collecting DNA from children, without parental consent. How many children know enough to say "get a warrant"?
      2. They don't have to have YOUR data to arrest you. They can get a sibling/parent/child match and use that to identify you as a suspect.

    3. Re:Fix'd by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 1

      1. DNA collected without the parent's presence will be tossed out as evidence, so what's the big deal?

      2. Only if they have cause to collect their DNA (in other words, they are a suspect) or they give it voluntarily. Even then, it won't be a match.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    4. Re:Fix'd by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      1. DNA collected without the parent's presence will be tossed out as evidence, so what's the big deal?

      You could use this same argument to justify any invasion of privacy by the police. They install a secret camera in your living room? Since it isn't admissible as evidence, "what's the big deal?"

      Even then, it won't be a match.

      You are missing the point. DNA results don't come back as "match" or "no match". They also come back as "related". If 50% of comparison points match, there is a good likelihood that they have found a parent, child, or sibling of the perp. They can then correlate that with other evidence (maybe the victim was the estranged girlfriend of the match's brother), and get a warrant to collect the suspect's DNA. You can't avoid being swept up in this by just refusing to give your own DNA.

  9. Re:Forget it? Unlikely by cdrudge · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have some nice swamp land for sale in Florida...

    It is only swamp land on the weekends. During the week it drains to another location.

  10. The law is there by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They just ignore it and abuse what they see as a loop hole the data might be good in court could lose big case in how it was collected.

  11. On he oher hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hey, lets turn the tables around! Every policeman as got to give his fingerprints and DNA. The next time an innocent person is shot in the back they can test Mr. shoot 'em all.

    1. Re:On he oher hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dunno about supplying DNA, but typically police officers are fingerprinted when they're hired. In addition, many private security companies fingerprint their employees as well.

  12. Bureaucrats with Guns by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are people in the United States who hate the government but love the police. Never really understood that.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
    1. Re:Bureaucrats with Guns by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No more odd than people who love the government but hate the police. (I tend to side with the police because at least they're out their putting their lives at risk to protect the public, unlike a paper-pusher bureaucrat.)

    2. Re: Bureaucrats with Guns by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, government fucks over a lot more people, more often. It's just seen as normal. Police fuck people over, even 1% of police, and we have a national crisis.

      For every police officer I've known it's just a really hard thankless job with moderate pay.

    3. Re:Bureaucrats with Guns by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Their Family has been running the Local PD's for years. a sort of inbuilt Get out of Jail free card,
      And Uncle Bubba is the local Judge. Cousin George is the DA.

      Need any more reasons?

    4. Re:Bureaucrats with Guns by hey! · · Score: 2

      Actually, neither position is peculiar, if you understand how republics actually work, as opposed to how they purport to work.

      Going all the way back to Rome, powerful organs of the state (like the army or praetorian guard) tend to become autonomous and ungovernable. Over the years countless minor acts of expedience become traditions, and their constitutional role in the republic is either undermined or revised.

      Today you can see this most clearly in Middle Eastern "republics", where it is never safe to talk about the "regime" without specifying which part. In Egypt the military is a major force in the economy, running businesses (like China's PLA does), and acting as a major source of social welfare and employment for its veterans. In Turkey the military plays an independent role in politics, exercising a kind of veto (sometimes unsuccessful) of populist Islamist politics. Americans are often mystified by our military aid to Pakistan, when its "government" so often acts like an enemy. It's not mysterious at all if you understand that that government is a collection of rival power centers.

      Here in the US, one very useful extra-Constitutional tradition we have is the separation of internal security (local policing, federal law enforcement) and external security (the military). This introduces a fissure in the deep state that works against its tendency to become independent and ungovernable. Internal security always poses the greatest immediate risk to liberty; external security the greatest potential for becoming ungovernable. It's by default seen as unpatriotic to deny the military anything it claims it needs.

      This is why Trump calling ICE raids a "military" operation was a big deal. Blurring the line between external and internal security is a radical, pseduo-conservative move that underlines a long and successful American tradition.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    5. Re:Bureaucrats with Guns by jenningsthecat · · Score: 1

      That was an insightful, informative, and well-written post - thanks for taking the time to write it.

      Blurring the line between external and internal security is a radical, pseduo-conservative move that underlines a long and successful American tradition.

      Should that have been "undermines"?

      --
      'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
    6. Re:Bureaucrats with Guns by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Blurring the line between external and internal security is a radical, pseduo-conservative move that underlines a long and successful American tradition

      I know what you mean. It felt that way when that radical, pseudo-conservative president, John F. Kennedy, decided to mobilize the Alabama Army National Guard in 1963 to enforce desegregation of Alabama's schools by providing an armed escort of African American students to the University of Alabama. A complete blurring of the line between military operation and federal law enforcement.

    7. Re:Bureaucrats with Guns by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      If you want an example of local police shenanigans, look no further than here:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      If you wrote this as a movie script they'd reject for being too far-fetched.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    8. Re: Bureaucrats with Guns by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe because all the local cops were racist as fuck and agreed with segregation. Bueler?

    9. Re:Bureaucrats with Guns by hey! · · Score: 1

      Nice try, but calling out federal troops has been going on for a lot longer than since 1961. The earliest examples predate the adoption of the Constitution, the 1783 Pennsylvania Mutiny, after which the Continental Army was disbanded.

      In 1792 Congress passed the Militia Act which provided for federalization of state militias in response to insurrection, and the act was used by President Washington that same year in response to the Whiskey Rebellion. In 1811 a combined force of local militia and federal troops put down a rebellion by newly enslaved Africans in the Territory of Orleans, which became Louisiana the following year. The US Navy was called out in 1831 to assist in putting down another slave rebellion. Four years later federal troops in DC were called out to deal with a bank riot in nearby Baltimore.

      Federal military intervention picked up noticeably after the Civil War, but it was not new even then.

      But there was one novel feature of Kennedy's calling out the Alabama Guard: it was the first use of federalized troop to protect the interests of someone other than major property owners.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    10. Re: Bureaucrats with Guns by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What about the FBI, Bueler?

    11. Re:Bureaucrats with Guns by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >Nice try, but calling out federal troops has been going on for a lot longer than since 1961

      Try? The point, which you've proved with you little history digression, is to show that the use of the military for "internal" security is neither radical, nor limited to "conservative" leadership (you forgot to mention Ol Hickory and all those dead indians, btw)

    12. Re:Bureaucrats with Guns by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      I tend to side with the police because at least they're out their putting their lives at risk to protect the public

      Except that the police are not "putting their lives at risk". Policing is not a particularly dangerous profession. Farmers, truck drivers, and even garbagemen, are more likely to die on the job. The most common reason that police die is suicide. The second most common reason is traffic accidents.

      Real life policing is very different from what is depicted in the movies. For instance, over a 30 year career, this is the median number of times that a police officer fires his weapon in the line of duty: 0.

    13. Re:Bureaucrats with Guns by hey! · · Score: 1

      Well, Indians were foreign nations, but you are shifting the discussion away here. I never said that using the military to quell insurrections was radical. I said blurring the distinction between internal and external security forces was radical.

      If you can't see the distinction, try this analogy. Sometimes necessity forces you to put a drill bit in a power drill to drill out a hopelessly damaged screw. That doesn't make a drill bit a screwdriver.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  13. Re:Forget it? Unlikely by twdorris · · Score: 1

    You have no idea what the express means, don't you...

    Irony owns you.

  14. Am I Paranoid? by puddingebola · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We seem to be moving towards a future where anonymity will no longer be possible. In a world where we carry pocket computers that track our location 24/7, and the police have personal databases of our genetic information, what opportunity will there be to simply be a face in the crowd. Technology continues to provide more and more of the tools that can make a perfect police state.

    1. Re: Am I Paranoid? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Agreed. I see no slow down in sight. Law makers always seem to exempt themselves from monitoring so they don't feel the pressure. There isn't a way to put this genie back in the bottle.

    2. Re:Am I Paranoid? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Paranoid? No. Naive? Yes. What makes you think this is a "future" that we are "moving towards" and not reality?

    3. Re:Am I Paranoid? by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      This was all ready in law since the 1980's. DNA, CCTV was just waiting for the fast databases and decades of storage.
      Been in jail? Prison? DNA time. That gets your kin too.
      Mil? Worked for the mil and had some medical work done? The DNA is online
      New DNA test in the private sector that some gov/private medial system pays for in full?
      Getting one part of the DNA can then be linked to crimes with parts of the DNA over decades, generations. Not just the person who had the DNA test but anyone who shares any part of the DNA.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  15. No more cold cases! by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 1

    Now, Officer John Law will have a trove of DNA samples to synthesize and contaminate any evidence in the unlocked property room that will 'solve' any stone-cold whodunnit! Get rid of every pesky minority in their fine Apartheid Red communities because DNA evidence to corn-pone mouth-breathing juries is the word of God writ large.

  16. Re:TRUMP DNA by sabri · · Score: 2

    Local Police Departments Are Building Their Own DNA Databases...ok, good luck.

    If you don't see the danger here, please see your local eye doctor.

    I just signed up as an ACLU member.

    --
    I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
  17. Re:TRUMP DNA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Local Police Departments Are Building Their Own DNA Databases...ok, good luck.

    If you don't see the danger here, please see your local eye doctor.

    I just signed up as an ACLU member.

    I think that the previous poster was having a hard time setting up a database at all, let alone a DNA database.

  18. I see no advantage to being in the database by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I can see no advantage of being included in the database.
    If you did something, you could be correctly be identified from the database.
    If you have done nothing, you can be incorrectly identified from the database.

    1. Re: I see no advantage to being in the database by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But likely you will have no choice in being in that database. The police don't like it when you say "no" even if you're perfectly justified, even if you have rights to effect it, and even if a judge declares you were right after the fact. The typical police response will be to club you over the head and then collect the DNA from the pool of blood that forms under it. There's no way to know that they've done it, no way to appeal and no way to control it. Once the data is out there it's completely out of your control and you only have to screw up once in your lifetime. ...and that could be as minor as a broken taillight.

    2. Re:I see no advantage to being in the database by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      At the moment, DNA can rule you out. Your DNA contains something very different from what they found on the crime scene - must be someone else then.

      Eventually, fakery will come. You victim grabbed you by the hair before you killed him during robbery. Cops probably have some hairs. You expect they'll be around soon, because armed robbery is your thing. So you wash your hair in an illegal DNA-containing shampoo that cost more than its weight in dope.

      When they get your samples, they will contain so much gunk DNA not found in the crime-scene hair.

      Another alternative: Steal 50 people's hair from the barber's garbage can. Contaminate your crime scenes with that, overwhelming them with false leads. Preferably hair from a barber with lots of ex-cons among the clientele.

  19. Re:TRUMP DNA by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

    If the local police are incompetent at maintaining a database, and/or analysing DNA, then this is more dangerous. Innocent people will be charged and convicted based on bogus data, faulty evidence, or unwarranted "scientific certainty" that they did it.

  20. Re:Forget it? Unlikely by AHuxley · · Score: 1

    On method is just to hold all images, DNA unless a person who had contact with the police asks for it to be removed.
    Its too expensive to go into past databases and remove people who had contact with police but did not get convicted.
    "MPs 'alarmed' by millions of mugshots on Brit cops' databases" (10 Mar 2015)
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
    Other methods are public private partnerships. A bank, private building security keeps CCTV for 6 months or more in partnership with local law enforcement.
    As its not a gov database, no privacy issues. If police ever need help, thats months of faces ready to be looked at due to the public/private partnership access.

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  21. Re:TRUMP DNA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sorry to say you just signed up for a lifetime of spam.

  22. I'm thinking back in the days by k6mfw · · Score: 1

    when police would investigate things like burglaries instead of focused on databases and surveillance. just a minor bitch from me this morning.

    --
    mfwright@batnet.com
  23. Thanks AHuxley for today's paranoia. by SlashGodet · · Score: 1

    A DNA swab harvests a vast swath of privacy. Two Parents share all your DNA; a sibling, a random half. Generational analysis! Targeting groups of people based on pseudo-science linking genes with behaviors. EEK! Another hair-raising invasion of privacy. Add the secret subpoena to harvest medical information, and we have a seizure of private information we have lost the right to even know about. I thought I was paranoid before, now it's further down the rabbit hole. Taking a person's DNA reveals private information about a web of individuals. Add increasing computational power (eg, NSA Data Center in Utah) and we have a gargantuan personal data breach.