Police chiefs call for DNA testing of all crime suspects

[Edward Britton <fremin@geocities.com>]

Lest I be labeled paranoid, perhaps I should freface this article by citing
its source:  from MSNBC via SCAN THIS NEWS:
==================================================
8/23/99

===[forwarded MSNBC article]===

Police chiefs call for DNA testing
Samples would be taken from all crime suspects

[http://www.msnbc.com/news/302042.asp]

By Hans H. Chen
APBNEWS.COM

Law enforcement officials are calling for every suspect placed under arrest
to have a DNA sample taken.

-      NEW YORK, Aug. 18 — A plan by New York City
-      police commissioner Howard Safir to take DNA
-      samples from everyone arrested has received the
-      backing of an influential police organization.

MEETING AT the New York Police Department headquarters, the executive
committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) on
Saturday voted unanimously to approve Safir’s resolution calling for states
and the federal government to fund the DNA sampling of criminal suspects
upon their arrest.

Currently, the FBI coordinates a database of DNA samples collected by 14
states. But each state collects DNA samples according to its own laws and
usually only from people who have already been convicted of crimes.

The IACP’s resolution calls for a standardized collection procedure of
everyone who is arrested for a crime. The sample would be destroyed if
charges were dropped or the suspect acquitted.

“We don’t wait until conviction to fingerprint someone,” said IACP President
Ronald Neubauer, chief of the St. Peters, Mo., Police Department. “We
fingerprint them upon arrest. That’s the same principle here.”

VOTE EXPECTED IN OCTOBER
Saturday’s vote sends the resolution to the IACP’s 16,000 members for
approval at the group’s annual meeting in late October. Members of the IACP
executive committee said they were confident the general assembly would
approve the resolution.

“There’s no question that this will pass because DNA is such a valuable tool
and such an innovative mechanism we can use,” Neubauer said. “I look at it
in terms of being able to look at people who did not commit the crime as
well as those who did.”
Safir first proposed entering DNA from arrestees into a database last year.
He said the move would solve crimes by enlarging the pool of possible
matches for DNA taken from crime scenes.

With discarded cigarette butts, dried saliva and chewing gum all now
yielding crime scene DNA, the need to compile a criminal database of DNA
samples becomes all the more important, IACP members said.

“Anything that helps in identification of individuals is certainly a great
aid,” said Chief William Nolan of the North Little Rock, Ark., police, who
also serves as the IACP’s general chairman for its Division of State
Associations of Chiefs of Police. “DNA is every bit as good if not better
than fingerprints have been in the past.”

---
[Sidebar:]‘DNA includes all sorts of information about you and your family,
and I personally would not want that information to be in the government’s
hands for any reason that it shouldn’t be.’ — EMILY WHITFIELD ACLU
---

CRITICS RAISE PRIVACY CONCERNS
But civil libertarians say that collecting DNA from criminal suspects raises
privacy concerns that fingerprints never broached.

“Fingerprints are a two-dimensional representation of your fingertip,” said
Emily Whitfield, a spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberty Union’s
national headquarters in New York City. “DNA is a sample from which
scientists have already identified 4,000 indicators for disease.

“DNA includes all sorts of information about you and your family, and I
personally would not want that information to be in the government’s hands
for any reason that it shouldn’t be. And if I’m arrested for jaywalking or
littering, or any minor thing, I don’t want to be giving up my DNA for
 that.”

SYSTEM ALREADY BACKLOGGED
Collecting DNA evidence from all criminal suspects would require enormous
amounts of money at a time when the DNA testing system is already severely
backlogged.

Across the country, DNA labs are facing a backlog of more than 450,000 DNA
samples taken just from those convicted of crimes. The National Commission
on the Future of DNA Evidence, a federal advisory body formed last fall by
Attorney General Janet Reno, called for $22.5 million to clear up the
backlog. Last month, the commission also said taking DNA samples from
arrestees was too costly and unfeasible.

But members of the IACP said their resolution called for strong funding to
accompany the creation of any program that takes DNA samples from arrestees.

“While no specific figures were discussed, there was talk that this was not
something that was not inexpensive and that proper funding would be
required,” Neubauer said.

‘TRYING TO GET NOTICED’
A call by 16,000 law enforcement commanders might spur Capitol Hill into
action, IACP members said.

“I think right now we’re trying to get noticed by Congress to at least look
into this,” said Bill Berger, the IACP’s third vice president and chief of
police in North Miami Beach, Fla.

Berger added that the IACP’s support of DNA collection from criminal
suspects mirrored the group’s earlier interest in another criminal database.

“Historically, the original fingerprints files were created by IACP and
given over to the FBI,” Berger said. “IACP was the first depository for
fingerprints, and the IACP has always had cutting-edge forecasting for
things such as this. So we saw this as another avenue.”

Hans H. Chen is an APBNews.com staff writer.

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