Tens of Thousands of Children Have Their DNA Stored by Police, Even if They are Not Charged With Any Crime
By Matt Blake,
Daily Mail (UK)
| 04. 27. 2012
Tens of thousands of children as young as ten are having their DNA swabbed and stored by police forces across the country, even if they are not charged with any offence.
One force admitted taking samples from more than 14,000 youngsters between the ages of ten and 17 over a period of three years.
Devon and Cornwall police say 14,383 children were arrested between 2007 and 2010 and that DNA was taken from the vast majority of them.
And those DNA records can be kept until the suspect reaches the unlikely age of 100 years old.
Not all police forces take DNA samples from suspects of crimes, but under Home Office guidelines they can legally take them from anyone over the age of criminal responsibility, which is currently ten years old.
Prison reform and children rights’ campaigners describe the revelation as ‘bonkers’ and said the DNA details should not be kept. They say while there are no official figures to confirm, the number of youngsters whose DNA has been stored could have run into the hundreds of thousands.
According to...
Related Articles
By David Jensen, California Stem Cell Report | 02.10.2026
Touchy issues involving accusations that California’s $12 billion gene and stem cell research agency is pushing aside “good science” in favor of new priorities and preferences will be aired again in late March at a public meeting in Sacramento.
The...
By Lauren Hammer Breslow and Vanessa Smith, Bill of Health | 01.28.2026
On Jan. 24, 2026, the New York Times reported that DNA sequences contributed by children and families to support a federal effort to understand adolescent brain development were later co-opted by other researchers and used to publish “race science”...
By Arthur Lazarus, MedPage Today | 01.23.2026
A growing body of contemporary research and reporting exposes how old ideas can find new life when repurposed within modern systems of medicine, technology, and public policy. Over the last decade, several trends have converged:
- The rise of polygenic scoring...
By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience | 01.15.2026
Genetic variants believed to cause blindness in nearly everyone who carries them actually lead to vision loss less than 30% of the time, new research finds.
The study challenges the concept of Mendelian diseases, or diseases and disorders attributed to...
