CRIMINALS

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The DNA of more than one million innocent people will not be wiped from police records. Instead the police will retain DNA profiles in anonymised form, leaving open the possibility of connecting them up with people's names, ministers have admitted. The admission appears to break a Coalition commitment to delete all innocent profiles, apart from those accused of violent or sex crimes, from police databases. Civil liberties groups accused the Government of a “disgraceful U-turn” and a “breach of promise” to destroy innocent people’s DNA.

It is the latest in a list of about-turns by the Government on key pledges, such as the selling off tracts of forest, axing free school milk for some children and capping welfare handouts for all claimants at £26,000 a year. Currently, in England and Wales, the DNA profiles of everyone arrested for a recordable offence are retained by the police, regardless of whether they were charged or convicted. This has meant that the police’s national DNA database holds more than five million profiles, including one million people with no criminal conviction.

Experts say storing the DNA of innocent people gave them an unfair “presumption of guilt” in the eyes of the police. The Coalition agreement last May said the Government would “adopt the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database”. DNA samples from innocent people would be deleted, apart from those accused of a sexual or violent offences, which would be held for five years. However, Home Office minister James Brokenshire admitted to MPs on a committee which is considering the legislation that police forces will retain innocent profiles.

Mr Brokenshire said he had won agreement from the information watchdog that the DNA profiles could be retained by forensic science laboratories. This would mean that the profiles would “be considered to have been deleted (even though the DNA profile record, minus the identification information, will still exist)”. However Mr Brokenshire admitted that it would be still be possible to identify the anonymised profiles.

He said, “Members of the committee will be aware that most DNA records … will include the original barcode, which is used by both the police and the FSS (Forensic Science Service) to track the sample and resulting profile through the system. It is therefore theoretically possible that a laboratory could identify an individual’s profile from the barcode, but only in conjunction with the force which took the original sample, by giving details of the barcode of the force and asking for the individual’s name.”

This would be a “would breach the Data Protection Act, and would not be accepted as evidence in a criminal investigation”, he said. However civil liberties groups were outraged by the apparent about-turn. Isabella Sankey, policy director at Liberty, said, “Anonymising intimate genetic information is nowhere near the same thing as destroying it, and this letter represents a massive U-turn on the part of two parties who promised that innocent people’s DNA would be destroyed.”

Retaining the profiles was a breach of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which ruled in 2008 that it was unlawful. She added, “This breach of promise is also in breach of the judgment of the Court of Human Rights and more litigation will no doubt follow. The minister’s assurance that criminal offences under the Data Protection Act are sufficient safeguard against DNA being re-identified is like saying that phone-hacking offences protected people’s privacy from the News of the World.”

Daniel Hamilton, a director at campaign group Big Brother Watch, said, “This is a disgraceful U-turn on the part of the government. Destroying physical DNA samples is a pointless gesture if the computer records are to be retained. Despite paying lip service to freedom and civil liberties, this government is fast proving itself to be every bit as illiberal as its predecessor.” Unveiling the legislation in January, Mr Clegg, the deputy Prime Minister, said the new Bill would “end the indefinite storage of innocent people’s DNA”.

The measure was also backed by Prime Minister David Cameron when he was in Opposition. In a speech in June 2009, he said, “Nearly five million people are on Labour’s DNA database. The Government says it’s to help fight crime. But almost a million of the people on it are completely innocent. And tens of thousands of those innocent people are children. It’s a situation that would cause concern under the most oppressive regimes in the world, but it's happening right here, right now in Britain... And we will remove innocent people's records from the DNA database.”

Last year, Sir Alec Jeffreys, the pioneer of genetic finger-printing, warned that keeping innocent people's DNA on the national database causes such distress it drove one man to kill himself. He said storing the DNA of innocent people gave them an unfair "presumption of guilt" in the eyes of the police. A Home Office spokesman insisted that profiles would be completely deleted from the national DNA database.

However within individual police systems, profiles are recorded in batches and it was not possible to delete one without affecting the rest, including convicted offenders. The spokesman said, “Our position has not changed at all. We will retain the DNA of the guilty, not the innocent. That means DNA records of the innocent will come off the database and physical samples will be deleted.” (Source: Daily Telegraph, Jul/11)

A mother was arrested and held at a police station for five hours for refusing to return a cricket ball which she claimed had damaged her car. Lorretta Cole says she was trying to teach her neighbours' children a lesson after the ball repeatedly landed on her property. She retrieved the £3.99 ball from the front of her home in North Baddesley, Hampshire, and refused to give it back when the father of the children asked her to. Mrs Cole was then visited on three occasions by police who tried to persuade her to return the ball and warned her that she faced being arrested if she refused.

She was interviewed at Lyndhurst police station and was detained for five hours while she was questioned and had her photograph, DNA swab and fingerprints taken. Following the interview, Mrs Cole was bailed to return to the police station pending advice from the Crown Prosecution Service. A Hampshire police spokeswoman said officers visited Mrs Cole three times in a bid to have the ball returned but on each occasion she was 'obstructive' and refused.

She added, "Mrs Cole was made aware that the incident would have to be treated as theft if she continued to keep the ball but that it would be much better for all involved if it could be dealt with by way of a commonsense approach. After continuing to refuse to return the ball the suspect was arrested and the ball was seized by police as evidence. Mrs Cole was given the opportunity to return the ball a number of times and if this had happened no further action would have been taken." (Source: Daily Mail, Jul/10)

Criminals sentenced to community punishments instead of prison are being let off sessions if they "oversleep". The National Audit Office found that a fifth of offenders breach community orders, equivalent to 22,000 a year. Researchers looked at 700 cases where criminals gave excuses for failing to turn up for appointments, courses or work sessions. Probation staff accept weak excuses because they are too busy to deal with the paperwork involved in sending offenders back to court.

One in ten said they had "slept in", were "confused" or had simply forgotten, according to the report. Probation officers accepted self-certified sicknotes in 11% of cases, and a similar proportion blamed "childcare and family issues". The report also found numbers of offenders stay on waiting lists for more than a year before starting courses and the unpaid community work, such as gardening, painting and litter-picking, is not "suitably demanding". (Source: Daily Mail, Jan/08)

Notorious Scots gangster, Ian "Blink" McDonald, claimed he was beaten up by Spanish police and had a gun shoved into his mouth. McDonald also moaned that he was forced into court barefoot after spending a night in the cells following a bust-up with his girlfriend. The convicted bank robber, who served 16 years, was on a three-day break in Benidorm with air stewardess Kirsten McFarlane when the couple had a furious row at their hotel. He was fined £420 for assaulting two Spanish cops.

McDonald, who has a gangland reputation as a Glasgow hard-man, whined, "They laid into me with truncheons then put a gun in my mouth. It was brutal. I'm covered in bruises. We had a bit of row on Saturday night and I didn't come back to the hotel until the morning. Kirsten was in reception and accused me of staying out all night with another woman. She said she was going to fly home early and I had better give her money. I was still drunk and told her she wasn't getting any and, next minute, she started shouting for her stuff and for police and security."

McDonald said he fought with two police and two members of hotel security when they demanded to get into his room. He added, "I grabbed a lampshade and there was a battle in the room and we ended up on the balcony. They stuck a gun in my mouth in the lift and asked me if I thought I was tough. I tried to get away in reception and one of them tripped me up and the two of them pulled out their guns. Some people might say I deserved it but it was over the top." (Source: Daily Record, Jul/06)

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