Apparently some of the problems are caused by people fibbing to the police about their actual names. Whatever next? “It’s Michael Mouse, honest officer” ;-)
Given this, one has to wonder how many record have the wrong DNA profile attached, or other ghastly errors.
Civil rights group Liberty’s Director, Shami Chakrabarti, suggested that the problems with the database raised serious questions about the police’s unrestrained
What next one wonders, walking on the cracks in the pavement? ;-)
A further cause for concern is that the database contains DNA profiles of around 150,000 children, a significant number having been arrested and then found to be innocent.
She pointed out that: "It is bad enough that we have a DNA database stuffed with innocents not charged with any offence” “Now it turns out we don't know the accuracy of the data. How many Postman Pats and Donald Ducks have entries on a system worthy of the Keystone Cops?"
Once you are on the system, even if arrested as a result of mistaken identity, your profile is never removed from the database.
It’s never likely to happen with the antidemocratic undertow in the way Government seems to operate these days, but the system needs to be radically overhauled, root and branch. With an independent system for expunging records, stringent limits as to when DNA data can be taken and provision for temporary records that are expunged after an investigation. Otherwise it is just another tool for a potential police state.
All these wonderful policing tools such as, ever more powerful computers, DNA databases and wall to wall CCTV...
It can not have been lost on some of NU-Labs ‘former’ Marxists, Trotskyists, etc., that if only the Soviet empire had been able to hang on, for just a few decades longer then the Berlin wall might well have fallen the other way and the Stasi could have been busy,, improving upon these new policing techniques.
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