The Wardman Wire

Dear Collective of Home Secretaries since about 2000

My apologies for addressing your DNA Database again.

However, now that even your regulator, in addition to the European Court of Human Rights, has declared your DNA database to be dodgy, it is necessary to tell you again that this database is in need of slight attention.

The title of the Human Genetics Commission Annual Report – Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear - sounds like a justification for the permanent surveillance state from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. A hackeyed observation, but a true one.

The only people it truly seems to apply to are politicians being judged by their colleagues, given how the previous Home Secretary Jacqui Smith appears to have misappropriated one hundred thousand pounds of public money, and been allowed to walk away with it Scot-Free.

You continue to trumpet at us with figures about “look how many arrests we have done”, and how this demonstrates the success of your policies, and validates your approach. When you have a policy of targets for policemen based on the number of arrests, this is dishonest. When you have a practice of making arrests in order to obtain DNA samples of the innocent, it becomes sinister.

You have continued to claim over a number of years that Section 44 Stop and Searches in London were necessary to protect the public, yet last year you were unable to supply figures for how many “terrorist” convictions resulted – only arrests. There’s a surprise.

The English DNA database contains samples from 3% of the under 18 population. The figure for the Scottish equivalent – praised by the European Court of Human Rights – is 0.1%.

Nor have I forgotten the lunatic proposal by Gary Pugh, the Director of Forensic Services for the Metropolitan Police Service

Gary Pugh, Scotland Yard’s director of forensic services, said children should be eligible if they exhibited behaviour indicating criminality in later life.

….

Mr Pugh told the Observer: “If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large.

He added: “You could argue, the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to Society.”

And the graph I have drawn from the annual report about the database puts one more question-mark over its use as a tool for effective policing.

This database will be severely clipped. In my view it needs to be reduced from its current scale of 5.8m records, being roughly an order of magnitude larger than anybody else’s ,to come into line with the civilised world – indicating a reduction of 85-95%.

The end does not always justify the means, especially in law. You could put Electronic Tags and Compulsory GPS monitors on the whole population in the name of crime prevention; that would not be justified.

This has not been forgotten, it will not be forgotten, and it will not be forgiven.

Your reputation cannot be retrieved, but do something right. For once. Please.

Rgds

Matt Wardman