We are all suspects now

By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 03/11/06):

IN THE EARLY 1880s one Alphonse Bertillon, a French policeman, came up with a revolutionary scientific idea for identifying criminals: Bertillon argued that certain physical characteristics — earlobes, the length of the left middle finger and so on — do not change over an adult lifetime, and no two adults could have the same measurements. By systematically recording these features on known criminals, the French criminologist declared, the police could develop a foolproof method for identifying crooks.

This system of anthropometry, or Bertillonage, was enthusiastically embraced by police forces throughout Europe and America. In 1884 Bertillon triumphantly identified 241 repeat offenders, several of whom were duly guillotined. For nearly 20 years, criminals around the world were routinely betrayed by, among other things, the length of their earlobes.

But then, in 1903, a man named Will West was arrested in Kansas and taken to Leavenworth prison. A thorough Bertillon test demonstrated that he was William West, a known malefactor. Except he wasn’t. That William West, with the same name, a similar mugshot and identical Bertillon measurements, was already in Leavenworth, serving a life sentence for murder. The credibility of the French system never recovered and was soon rendered redundant by fingerprinting.

The fallibility of the Bertillon system is worth recalling as we embark on a long overdue debate on the use and potential abuse of Britain’s national DNA database, a scientific breakthrough of immense value raising fraught ethical issues.

The DNA database is probably the single most important crime-fighting tool invented. The number of crimes solved through DNA technology has quadrupled in 12 months: last year alone, police matched 45,000 DNA samples to crimes, including 422 murders and 9,000 burglaries. New DNA collection techniques and new analytical tools have reopened cold cases up to 20 years old. Today the criminal’s worst enemy is his own DNA, and the majority of the criminal population has already been banged up in the database.

Yet the DNA database, partly because of its effectiveness, is expanding at an alarming and dangerous rate. Already, Britain has the world’s largest encyclopaedia of the genes of its own citizens: 3.5 million DNA profiles, and 40,000 more being added every month.

At least 139,000 of the people on the database are innocent of any crime, and 24,000 are children and youths under the age of 18. Some are victims, witnesses or people who have voluntarily provided DNA in order to be ruled out of an investigation. Police routinely take DNA samples from anyone arrested on suspicion of offences ranging from drink-driving to murder. These remain on a permanent criminal database even if the individual is never cautioned or charged, let alone convicted, in a gross violation of civil rights.

In Europe, only one person in every hundred has his or her DNA officially recorded; in the US the figure is closer to one in two hundred. In Britain one out of every twenty people is already in the state’s memory banks, forever.

Tony Blair (who, inevitably, was publicly swabbed and tagged in 1999) has suggested expanding the database to include every citizen in the country. What began as an efficient way to catch reoffending criminals is being transformed into a net for people who have not committed any crime, but who might do so at some point in the future. As Sir Bob Hepple, chairman of the Nuffield Council on bioethics, said this week, we risk becoming “a nation of suspects”, guilty until proven innocent by our DNA.

The DNA database is neither impartial nor colour-blind, and heavily biased against young males from ethnic minorities. Research is under way to establish whether a suspect’s skin colour and ethnic background can be predicted from a DNA sample, in a sort of genetic identikit.

But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the DNA database is that is has grown into its present vast shape almost entirely without public consultation. Its future role and scale has not been debated in Parliament or put to a vote, and consultation on the issue is only now under way. Instead, it has quietly, and swiftly, expanded genetically fingerprinting the innocent and underage as well as the guilty, blurring the vital distinction between a criminal DNA database and one that could, eventually, embrace everyone.

A universal DNA database would be a blatant invasion of privacy, and a store of knowledge widely open to future abuse. Our own DNA belongs uniquely to each of us, and the Government has no right to retain a record of it without a criminal conviction. Mr Blair has stated: “The number on the database should be the maximum number you can get.” On the contrary, it should contain the maximum number of convicted criminals you can get, and not one other person: no children, no prospective criminals, no one who has been picked up merely on suspicion. There should also be far more rigour and consistency in the way samples are collected and retained, and an independent ombudsman to oversee and manage it.

That is the only way to retain the credibility of this extraordinarily valuable crime-fighting tool. DNA matching is not a perfect science. (In a strange echo of the Will West case, statisticians say that eight out of ten people have a DNA “twin” somewhere in the world.) But it is probably the best we will ever develop.

As the rise and abrupt fall of the Bertillon system shows, public faith in the science of criminal identification can evaporate with great speed. The best way to ensure that modern police DNA testing does not go the same way is stop the criminal gene pool of the national database being diluted, as it were, by the inclusion of innocents, children and people who hope that by donating a dollop of their DNA they are demonstrating a clear conscience.