Arrested for returning goods???

"The Home Secretary cited an example of where DNA data should not be retained — that of someone arrested for shoplifting when trying to exchange goods for which she was carrying the receipt,"

So you can be arrested, and illegally detained in Britain even if you have a store receipt? Your DNA taken, and the Home Secretary, suggests that only then should your DNA not be kept like the criminals you will become? And of course you are likely to be a criminal because you dared return goods for store credit! Unless you keep your nose clean for 5 years!

What if you are arrested again for demanding to return faulty goods, does the 5 years count start again?

What's the plan? Treat everyone as criminals, make their lives so miserable and so similar to the life of criminals as to make little difference whether they commit a crime or not?

What if they DID steal that DVD? You arrest them, check their DNA against EVERY CRIME FOR WHICH DNA WAS EVER RECORDED and they're innocent. What then? You've shown that they have a lower probability of being a criminal than any random person grabbed off the street!

You could grab an MP from Parliament and they would have a bigger probability of matching the DNA database than the shop lifter.

Yet you decide to keep their DNA anyway. You've written them off, they are on to make it easier to arrest them in future, even if they're just returning goods for store credit. What difference does innocence or guilt matter? You can never reform any criminal, once an Expenses fiddler, ALWAYS an expenses fiddler.

Once a liar to Parliament, always a liar to Parliament!

Vote Labour, tough on crime, even imagined future ones by innocent people!

Because you know how honest Jacqui Smith was!? Well Alan Johnson is so feeble and weak that he cannot reverse any of her bad decision! She left in shame, yet the choices she made he cannot change.

Yeh, Vote Labour, I dare you.

So . . .

. . . we have no evidence to suggest that an innocent persons DNA has been used to solve another crime, ever.

Yet we still want to retain it for several years, for people who haven't been convicted of a crime.

How about you just fuck off and stop this bastard version of a democracy.

the birthday paradox

don't know if it was another (response to another) article on here or somewhere else, but somebody mentioned the possibly applicability of the "birthday paradox" (in a room of 23 people there is 50% chance that one of them will share my birthday and a 99% chance if there are 57 people) to the DNA database.

if there are a few tens (maybe even hundreds) of thousands of people in there the chances of there being a false match amongst then are slim, but if there are 60 milllion people in there, it could be almost guaranteed.

the maths is fine but the knowledge of whats involved in the DNA fingerprinting is beyond me...

anyone knowledgeable out there?

contradict

1) there is no evidence of innocent people's DNA solving crimes and only 0.3 crimes are solved by this DNA farce anyway.

YET

2) The benefit to public safety outweighs the impact on privacy.

So how does something for which we have no measure outweigh anything?

re: birthday paradox

Someone mentioned this a long long time ago and I ended up having a go at the calculations but I don't know if these are the ones being referred to...

But in any case, here's what I came up with, using the Birthday Paradox formulas, and 'bc' to get some absurdly long numbers in there. The biggest assumption is that the loci chosen for the profiles are truly random, and evenly distributed across the entire range of possible values - possibly unwise because nature has a knack of not doing that sort of handy thing.

On the basis that we are told that the chance of a coincidental match is 'one in a billion', a set of 117540 random samples would give us a probability of 99.9pct that two samples are (apparently) the same (as opposed to being the same sample twice). For a 99.999 percent chance of two samples being the same you need a set of at least 151743. Here 'being the same' means indistinguishable given the criteria of 'one in a billion'.

I do wonder how this reflects on the actual database and how many 'replicates' (allegedly same person more than once, different names etc) are actually coincidental matches.

The other 'wrong match probability' figures I did were for a full-population database of 50 million, and came out with a result that with a discrimination of '1 in a billion', you are looking at a wrong-match probability of 5percent on *every* search you make. This for the case where you are looking for a matches to samples you already have.

E&OE. If anyone can refute the numbers, please be gentle and show your working...

I dare say I could probably show mine (matron) at some point.

Oh and there's also the article somewhere about an FBI(?) database showing a lot more coincidental matches than should have been possible...(?)

Fallacious reasoning

"The Committee rejected this option, however, judging that the benefit to public safety of retention for three years outweighed the impact on individual privacy"

I'm sorry, but this I think that this is almost never true.

It's Not Accurate Anyway.

Fingerprints are not 100% accurate... never have been, but it's only in the last 20yrs that this has become more apparent as the database grows, so does the false positives being recorded.

The exact same thing applies to the DNA database, the larger it becomes the more likely a false positive becomes. They could end up shooting themselves in the foot when DNA evidence is challenged and found to be false... could render DNA evidence useless... at least as useless as the coppers who only target easy arrests for non crimes.

But try getting them to deal with the scrote next door who's been driving a car with no tax or mot for 12 months and suddenly they are no where to be seen... But god forbid I forget to put my seatbelt on when returning from the garage to my home which is all of 500 yards.

Halving the duration turns wrong into right

Recommendation: We'll only breach our citizens' human rights for three years instead of six years, in contravention of a treaty to which we are bound.

So, by the same token, would it be OK if I evaded income tax for only three years instead of six years? The reduced duration of law breaking would make everything OK would it?

How about ...

Refusing to allow DNA to be taken.

When forced ensure that you have a note of all officers numbers involved.

Employ a very expensive barrister on Legal Aid and sue them individually for assault in the High Court through to the European Court.

Ensure that you refuse to pay any costs/fines

Go to jail rather than pay up if you are asked to contribute/fined

If everyone was to do this then the whole thing would fail!

Remember Laws are (or should be) in place with the agreement of the populace and not the other way round.

Here's the thing...

Strictly speaking DNA testing can only be used to eliminate a person. This was common knowledge only a few years ago, but this government are pushing the database as a means to match people with crimes. That isn't really the way DNA testing works.

The way crime detection should work is that having collected all their evidence and identified their suspect(s) the police should use DNA testing as a final clincher. The way the government want it to work is that if DNA evidence is available they check it against the database and then go out and collect further evidence to prove the vict^H^H^H^H suspect guilty. That way they'll avoid finding any evidence that casts doubt on a subject's guilt. Oh, and they'll save a fortune on on old fashioned police legwork.

Here's a simple scenario where DNA evidence would be completely wrong. Imagine your house has been burgled and a baseball cap has been found in your bedroom. The cap has some hair attached, complete with roots. DNA tests on the hair match a youth who has a record for burglary. An easy collar, right? Wrong. The youth left the hat in a pub one night and the real burglar picked it up, complete with hair, and wore it on the day he comitted the burglary.

Does anybody think that in the scenario above the police would make much effort to look beyong the DNA evidence? Like fuck they would.

The whole concept of the DNA database is fatally flawed, even if only the DNA of convicted criminals is retained.

Where's the benefit?

It might be appropriate to claim a benefit from the 0.3 per cent of cases matched, or the total of 23 serious crimes solved per year, if this were the end of the story.

But, first of all, there seems to have been no estimate of how many of these crimes would have been solved in more traditional ways had they not showed up on the NDNAD.

It's clear also that despite a significant increase in the number of profiles recorded, both guilty and innocent, the number of matches isn't increasing. The number of cold cases must be declining as time passes and some criminals at least are presumably now becoming adept at not leaving or disguising DNA traces.

Crucially, though, the statistics entirely fail to take into account the disbenefits of the DNA database. Without doubt the heavy-handedness of its introduction and use will have reduced public co-operation; arguably the single greatest factor in tackling crime. How many criminals were not caught because of this it is difficult to know. But the number not detected because of public distrust could easily exceed the score that were detected without needing any additional effort because they showed a match on the NDNAD.

Yeah But

Doesn't this sort of thing make you stop and think?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/8574507.stm