Let’s say a child in your neighborhood is raped and murdered. The police have no leads, and the community is in uproar. You know that you are innocent. After two fruitless weeks, the investigators ask everyone in the neighborhood, on a completely voluntary basis, to submit a sample for DNA analsys.
Do you agree? Does it matter if you have an unassailable alibi, a merely good one, or no alibi at all? Why or why not?
Absolutely not. Never volunteer anything to law enforcement. They can get a warrant, or they can get lost. The samples could get mixed up at the lab, contaminated, mis-tested, whatever.
For the same reason you should never talk to the police, I would not. It’s not about the Truth. It’s about what a prosecutor can convince a jury is true.
And as George Carlin rightly pointed out, a jury is composed of 12 people who weren’t even smart enough to get out of jury duty.
I wouldn’t do it. Aside from the fact that ruling me out wouldn’t be any great help to them since I’m not someone they’d be looking at for that anyway, I don’t trust them and I don’t want them to have my DNA. If the police want cooperation from the public they need to change their way of dealing with the public.
It may be standard practice to destroy the non-matching DNA samples after something like that, I’m not sure, and if they were going to, I’d be a bit more willing to do it, but if they were going to keep it on file, no way. I’m not planning to commit any crimes but who knows if at some point in the future I’d have some reason to not want them to have it.
The alibi thing wouldn’t matter to me because I really wouldn’t be concerned that they would actually charge me with the crime, although I guess it would be very remotely possible if there was some kind of error and they for some reason believed I was an accomplice or something.
If I had some connection to the family that lost the child, I might. In addition to knowing I didn’t do it, I’m about the least likely suspect for that type of crime. If I could contribute to any momentum that led the perpetrator to incriminate himself (either by participating or acting suspicious in his refusal), considering the horrible nature of the crime, I’d feel that was all to the good. I don’t think I’d be as moved to take the small risk to myself for an absolute perfect stranger. In either case, I would also want the family to go first, since experience says that’s the most likely place to find the perpetrator.
On top of this I would have conditions:
I don’t care, I’ll give them DNA. Just give me a Barely Legal magazine.
I’d do it. Perhaps I’m too trusting.
No
No, but I understand this has happened in the US and the UK.
One danger (at least in the UK, I’m not sure it’s legally allowed to happen in the US) is that your DNA profile can end up in the national database, never to be removed.
What is the point of these? As long as it’s voluntary, wouldn’t the person who actually committed the crime just not volunteer?
Anyone who didn’t volunteer would be placed under suspicion.
I like how a couple posters rules themselves out as, ‘not someone who they would be looking for anyway’. Last I checked, murderers and rapists have no bounds. But if you’re middle class with 2.5 kids and all… :rolleyes:
No need for the rolleyes. The OP specified that we were not, in fact, guilty.
Also, I’m saying that through long experience of living my life, I’m rarely suspected of anything, even the stuff I actually do :). It’s just the truth. It’s the reverse of those people who always get stopped and followed in stores. In real life I get perfect strangers asking me to watch their valuables, enough that it becomes annoying. Anyone else is also welcome to apply the facts of their own life to their decision.
Absolutely not! I have lived a trouble free life and after more than half a century I have never even had my fingerprints taken. I’ll be damned if I am going to volunteer to prove that I am inoccent.
What a poor excuse for law enforcement skills it is to go door to door and require proof of innocence. Abominable over reach.
So I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t? By trying to avoid incriminating myself do to possible mistakes, I could be incriminating myself?
I wonder what percent of people submit to these things. That seems like a lot of people to follow around waiting for them to dispose of a Kleenex, if everybody doesn’t is a suspect (or even a ‘person of interest’).
You’re missing the part where it is voluntary. The policy response to the idea of allowing this to be required of someone is a very different thread.
If you could be implicating yourself by refusing, it might as well be required.
Uh, I’m not the police. I gave no opinion of whether they SHOULD look at me, just that they wouldn’t. Mostly because I’m a woman, also because I have nothing overtly sketchy about me that WOULD make them look twice at me despite being a woman, such as a sex offender boyfriend or a police record. It’s just a simple fact.
But since you bring it up, it’s true that if the police really took a long look at random average women every time they were searching for a child rapist/murderer, they would not be doing their jobs and they wouldn’t be solving many such crimes.
Still, though, it’s considerably different. Should the law act to prevent me from revealing my DNA if that’s my choice?
And I don’t think the reality is that every refusal would be suspicious. Some people are well-established privacy enthusiasts who would matter-of-factly decline out of principle. Others might furtively head out of town, leaving their apartments miraculously cleaned of every bit of DNA. Looking at someone like that a bit closer might make sense. Tactically it probably doesn’t make sense to treat every refusal as suspicious.
Not to take **Skald’s **thread farther afield than he wants it, but how much of this is about the DNA? Would you feel the same way about it if it were asking for a fingerprint, or an alibi?