Welsh Police Take DNA Samples from more than 5,500 Children
By James McCarthy,
Wales Online
| 09. 22. 2013
A one-year-old baby is among thousands of children who have had their DNA taken by police officers in Wales.
A total of 5,561 kids were swabbed by Wales’ four forces as part of their investigations since 2010.
South Wales Police took the most – 2,866 samples since 2010 – but Dyfed Powys Police swabbed the youngest children. The mid and west Wales force was the only one to take from children under 10.
These included a one-year-old last year, a two-year-old in 2010, a seven-year-old in 2011, an eight-year-old in 2012 and a nine-year-old in 2011.
Nick Pickles is director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch.
He said: “I’m stunned that someone thought it was acceptable to take a DNA sample from a one-year-old baby. On what possible grounds is that reasonable or necessary?
“The UK DNA Database has grown to become the largest in the world and yet there is little evidence to suggest DNA profiling results in a higher sense of public safety.”
Andrew Neilson runs the Howard League for Penal Reform.
He said...
Related Articles
By Emily Glazer, Katherine Long, Amy Dockser Marcus, The Wall Street Journal | 11.08.2025
For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby.
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup—called...
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 11.07.2025
This week, we heard that Tom Brady had his dog cloned. The former quarterback revealed that his Junie is actually a clone of Lua, a pit bull mix that died in 2023.
Brady’s announcement follows those of celebrities like Paris...
By Emily Mullin, Wired | 10.30.2025
In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world when he revealed that he had created the first gene-edited babies. Using Crispr, he tweaked the genes of three human embryos in an attempt to make them immune to HIV and...
Public domain portrait of James D. Watson by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
and the National Human Genome Research Institute on Wikimedia Commons
James Watson, a scientist famous for ground-breaking work on DNA and notorious for expressing his antediluvian opinions, died on November 6, at the age of 97. Watson’s scientific eminence was primarily based on the 1953 discovery of the helical structure of DNA, for which he, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or...
