Pretending to be Tough

Posted by Pete Shanks April 19, 2010
Biopolitical Times

The English forensic DNA database has been dragged into the current UK election campaign under false pretenses. Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called attitudes to forensic DNA "a big dividing line at this election" and accused the opposition Conservative Party of being soft on crime because they do not support his policy. Fact-checkers call this claim "misleading" at best; less inhibited commenters call it a lie.

Britain has a huge DNA database, which includes at least 857,000 (by now, maybe a million) people who have never been charged with a crime, let alone convicted. Nearly 100,000 in the database are less than 13 years old. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in December 2008 -- unanimously and vigorously -- that keeping the data of innocent citizens indefinitely violated their civil rights.

The Labour government's first response was to suggest keeping the records for 12 years; this was then reduced to 6 years. (That's roughly similar to the situation in Scotland, which has different law.) The third party, the Liberal Democrats, insist that innocent people should have the right to removal of their DNA from the database. The Conservatives proposed a 3-year limit, but withdrew their objection in order to get some limit into law before the election, which is to take place on May 6th. They have committed, if elected, to reform the new law.

Because of this, Brown claimed that "the Conservative party wants to destroy the data that is available to help in the fight against crime." He based this on publicity about a murder case solved with DNA evidence not from the standing database but taken when the killer was arrested for another crime. Neither the Conservative nor the Liberal Democrat proposals would have prevented this identification.

Labour, as the traditionally left-wing party, has long battled accusations of being soft on crime. Their response in the 1990s, articulated by Tony Blair but reportedly written by Gordon Brown, was the catchy soundbite, "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime." Now they seem to be smearing their opponents with dubious accusations, including a misleading video, available on YouTube.

Dr Helen Wallace of GeneWatch UK, which has been campaigning against the retentions, responded:

"Murders solved by keeping innocent people's DNA records are as elusive as the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. If the Government has a case to make why can't it produce the evidence?"

The factchecker for The Times noted that even if they accept the government's unsupported claims, the database has turned up far fewer crimes than would be expected from a random selection of the population, and concluded:

There are three possible explanations for this discrepancy: 1. people on the DNA database are more law-abiding than the general population; 2. DNA isn’t as good at getting convictions as we thought; or, 3. the statistics are nonsense.

Previously on Biopolitical Times: