Michael Seringhaus recently argued in the New York Times to keep everyone’s DNA on file in police databases:
The president was correct in saying that we need a more robust DNA database, available to law enforcement in every state, to “continue to tighten the grip around folks who have perpetrated these crimes.” But critics have a point that genetic police work, like the sampling of arrestees, is fraught with bias. A better solution: to keep every American’s DNA profile on file.
Your sensitive genetic information would be safe. A DNA profile distills a person’s complex genomic information down to a set of 26 numerical values, each characterizing the length of a certain repeated sequence of “junk” DNA that differs from person to person. Although these genetic differences are biologically meaningless — they don’t correlate with any observable characteristics — tabulating the number of repeats creates a unique identifier, a DNA “fingerprint.”
The genetic privacy risk from such profiling is virtually nil, because these records include none of the health and biological data present in one’s genome as a whole. Aside from the ability in some cases to determine whether two individuals are closely related, DNA profiles have nothing sensitive to disclose.
But for law enforcement, the profiles are hugely important: DNA samples collected from crime scenes are compared against a standing database of profiles, and matches are investigated. Obviously, the more individuals profiled in the database, the more likely a crime-scene sample can be identified, hence the president’s enthusiasm to expand the nationwide repository.
A counterpoint followed from Mike Habersack in a Letter to the Editor:
Michael Seringhaus’s suggestion that all people in the United States submit DNA to the police sacrifices the bedrock foundation of presumption of innocence for ”fairness.” This goes against more than 200 years of practice and principle in the United States. If fairness were more important, then we would have long ago required all people to submit fingerprints (presumably at birth) to the police.
Why not go one step further and require closed-circuit cameras inside everybody’s home? Would that not help the police even further in solving crime and also being fair?
The problem with this logic is that citizens do not exist to serve the police, but rather the reverse. The obvious answer that serves both fairness, justice and the presumption of innocence is that DNA profiles should be maintained only for those actually convicted of crimes.
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