When innocence in no defence
It’s all a matter of perspective. When is innocent not innocent? When you’re Stuart Hyde, Assistant Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, who speaks on DNA for the Association of Chief Police Officers.
Hyde was interviewed on Radio 4’s PM programme this evening* on the subject of collecting and keeping on a database, the DNA of children who have been neither cautioned or convicted of any offence:
Hyde: We’re not abusing any liberties other than to reduce and detect crime… This is not a criminal conviction, this is a reference database that we can use not just to identify people who are responsible, much more importantly, to eliminate people from enquiries before we even get to speak to them…
Isn’t that kind? Stuart Hyde: taking the police work out of police work. If some DNA evidence turns up at a crime scene they can run it against the database of all those people just to make sure they’re still innocent. Don’t worry sir, we can re-establish your innocence in a matter of moments. Everyone’s a suspect until the computer says they’re not.
It would certainly make episodes of Poirot more… far reaching:
Poirot: Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid there has been a murder.(Women faint. Men shout, “I say! Jolly bad show!”)
Poirot: Now, ladies and gentlemen, I must ask that that you all remain where you are. Nobody must leave this country until I have eliminated you from my enquiries. Officer, do we have the butler’s DNA?
A murder in John O’Groats? Let’s make sure it wasn’t that bloke in Land’s End. Nobody, it would seem, falls into the clutches of the police for nothing. Except Gerry Conlon, obviously. Hyde also said he’d be in favour of cataloguing every man jack of us, innocent or guilty. He went on:
We are looking after that data, we are looking after it properly and we have some of the most strict guidelines in the world for making sure that it’s safe and secure.
Interviewer: Even if you’re holding, as we speak, the DNA detail of a hundred thousand innocent people?
Hyde: We’re holding the details of a hundred thousand people who were arrested in relation to criminal offences within the UK.
It’s semantically true, of course, but the innuendo is there nevertheless. In other words, they must have been up to something or why else would they have been arrested? The police just didn’t have enough to pin it on them. Translation: Innocent? You may think that…
Does anybody know the penalty for refusing to give a DNA sample?
*The interview will be on the PM website until Monday evening. The segment’s right at the beginning lasts 12 minutes or so.
UPDATE: Interesting. Home Office Minister and ID Card fall guy, Andy Burnham on the Today programme, this morning (interview here, RealPlayer required)…
The DNA database is not a criminal record. There are proper safeguards in place as to how information stored on there can be used, and it focuses around the prevention and detection of crime.
Now, I don’t know about you but that sounds to me incredibly similar to what Stuart Hyde said on PM. I mean practically identical in content.
Hyde: This is not a criminal conviction…
Burnham: The DNA database is not a criminal record…Hyde: We are looking after that data, we are looking after it properly and we have some of the most strict guidelines in the world for making sure that it’s safe and secure
Burnham: There are proper safeguards in place as to how information stored on there can be used…Hyde: We’re not abusing any liberties other than to reduce and detect crime…
Burnham: It focuses around the prevention and detection of crime…
It looks very much to me as if the government and the police (as Sir Ian Blair , an organisation) have colluded on an agreed line to take on this matter. What other explanation? Mental telepathy? Did Hyde copy Burnham’s homework? Just who’s representing who’s interests here? It’s like the 90 Day detention lobbying all over again. You know, when the police lobbied the Government and so the Government lobbied the police to lobby reluctant backbenchers?
Burnham was on Channel Five’s news headlines as well tonight, spouting the old “if you’re innocent, you’ve nothing to fear”. It’s a line he likes to drop into conversation whenever he can. Not only is it a rancid little pitch to the prejudices of the ignorant it also happens to be blackly, filthily false.
Now, it’s likely Burnham’s career is going to be wrecked when the groaning ID Cards boiler finally explodes in what most people expect to be a spectacular fashion. And little sympathy may it garner him. He’s obviously desperate and willing to sow fear and false reassurances in order to save both the project and his neck. He is, after all, shilling a “Freedom is Slavery” ticket. He really believes you can sell horse manure to people by telling them it’s ice cream.
Posted on January 21st, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Some government apologist on C4 news claimed that evidence collected in this manner had helped to solve 3,000 offences. Now even if we assume that the gentleman in question isn’t being deliberately disigenuous this would seem to raise a number of questions: 1) What are these offences and how serious were they? The implication was that they were all murders or similar, but I doubt that’s the case; 2) How crucial was this evidence? Did it play a central role or merely an incidental one, which in practice made no difference to the case in question. Again the implication was that it was the latter, but it’s worth emphasising that a case based entirely on DNA evidence is pretty shaky. CSI makes great TV, but it isn’t all that realistic.
That C4 piece had me screaming at the telly, which is fairly common these days when Home Office spokesmen are on (they also had Hyde, who provoked a similar reaction, mainly due to him again insinuating that the police don’t arrest and take your DNA for no reason; ‘if we put the cuffs on, you’re guilty, sunshine’, was the implication). There’s something remarkably nasty going on here when the key legal definition of innocence is being drastically rewritten (innocent not on DNA register isn’t the same as innocent on DNA register) by the police without anyone else being consulted. It’s not the police state I’m worried about, it’s the state of the police.
Anyway, with the help of the Home Office themselves, it’s possible to have a guess at the number of crimes *towards the solving of which innocent people’s DNA samples contributed* - it’s apparently about 250 ‘crime scene samples’, but only 120 actual crimes are mentioned, presumably the most serious ones. Pretty much 200,000 innocent people (by the conventional legal definition, not Hyde’s ghastly rewriting) are on it, which gives rather a low hit rate. This, coupled with the cost of taking and keeping samples does tend to suggest it’s a waste of effort which only benefits the sort of DNA testing company Mr. Blunkett so kindly offered his services to. That’s ‘waste of effort’ as regards crime solving, which is the alleged benefit - as regards criminalising the entire population so anyone who incurs the Government’s displeasure can easily be smeared and linked to some crime it’s probably good value. But that’s just my cynicism coming to the fore again.
For the original report, search for “9498 DNA Expansion 5th” on Google. Take a copy, do some maths - comparing the rate of increase of innocent people on the register against the rate of increase in DNA samples obtained from crime scenes is instructive.
Do the figures for the number of children whose DNA profiles are being stored on the National DNA Database include:
Euan Blair son of Prime Minister Tony Blair, aged 16, drunk and disorderly.
William Straw - son of the then Home Secretary Jack Straw, aged 17, suspicion of supplying cannabis in a sting by The Mirror newspaper.
It wasn’t so long ago the Police Federation was up in arms at the suggestion that the DNA of all police officers be put on the database. I can’t remember what their objections was. Perhaps someone could enlighten me.