This is based on watching police procedural shows not a personal legal issue.
I frequently see scenes where the police run a set of unknown fingerprints or DNA evidence through some centralized database to see if they can get a match for it. I also see scenes where the police ask a group of people to voluntarily submit their fingerpritns and/or DNA samples so they can be cleared of some crime. My understanding is that both of these procedures are generally factual.
My question is what happens to forensic evidence you voluntarily submit as part of an investigation? Is it only used as part of that investigation or does it automatically go into a centralized database where it will be available for future comparisons?
When it’s happend in the UK, the Police give the assurance that all specimens will be destroyed afterwards.
Um, i dont think they do Sizzles. Once you give DNA voluntarily or not, it stays on the db and normally take a legal case to get it off.
Afterall, if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide etc.
However, now we got rid of those wankers NuLabour, the Tories say they are going to change that. We will see.
From Wiki:
"By November 2008 it had grown to 5.3m people.[2] The database, which grows by 30,000 samples each month, is populated by samples recovered from crime scenes and taken from police suspects[3] and (in England and Wales) anyone arrested and detained at a police station, even if they are not subsequently charged with an offence[4].
“Tony Blair said in 2006 that he could see no reason why the DNA of everyone should not ultimately be kept on record.”
Kindly go and fuk yourself Tony.
“In July 2009, a lawyer, Lorraine Elliot, was arrested on accusations of forgery which were quickly proven to be false. A DNA sample was taken from her and logged. She was cleared of the accusations a day later and completely exonerated. <…snip…>, Mrs Elliot subsequently lost her job (even though she was completely innocent of any crime) when the fact that her DNA profile was stored on the national database was discovered during a subsequent work-related security check. Only in 2010 was she finally able to have her details removed from the database, though by then the damage had been done”
You’re correct Sinical Brit, the Police aren’t supposed to, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmhaff/222/222i.pdf,
but voluntarily provided samples do end up on the DNA database;
As of 24 April 2009, just under 1 million people with profiles on the database…36,000 had not even been arrested (as they were victims of crime or people who had voluntarily given a DNA sample…
- In response to the Court’s judgment, the Government published its proposals for the
DNA Database in May 2009, as follows:
Profiles provided voluntarily would not be stored on the database.
Anecdotal info:
When my house was burglarized 20-some years ago, the police didn’t even bother to lift fingerprints, even though we had some places where they would have been easily found. The police told me then that it just wasn’t worth the effort, since someone would have to manually search the fingerprint database for a match, and that was too much effort for a minor crime. Also, the criminals were probably juveniles, without any fingerprint record on file.
But a police friend recently told me that here in the USA, they are using fingerprints much more often to catch criminals for minor crimes, like such house burglaries. Two reasons:
- because of automation, it’s much simpler to search the fingerprint database for a match.
- because it’s now much more likely to find their fingerprints in the database. From the trend of a decade or so ago to encourage parents to have their pre-school children fingerprinted, in case they were kidnapped! – these kids are now becoming teenagers, and some of them commit crimes. Now it is much more likely that their fingerprints are in the database.