NYTimes | Slowly, and largely under the radar, a growing number of local law
enforcement agencies across the country have moved into what had
previously been the domain of the F.B.I. and state crime labs — amassing
their own DNA databases of potential suspects, some collected with the
donors’ knowledge, and some without it.
And that trend — coming at a time of heightened privacy concerns after
recent revelations of secret federal surveillance of telephone calls and
Internet traffic — is expected only to accelerate after the Supreme
Court’s recent decision upholding a Maryland statute allowing the
authorities to collect DNA samples from those arrested for serious
crimes.
These local databases operate under their own rules, providing the
police much more leeway than state and federal regulations. And the
police sometimes collect samples from far more than those convicted of
or arrested for serious offenses — in some cases, innocent victims of
crimes who do not necessarily realize their DNA will be saved for future
searches.
New York City has amassed a database with the profiles of 11,000 crime
suspects. In Orange County, Calif., the district attorney’s office has
90,000 profiles, many obtained from low-level defendants who give DNA as
part of a plea bargain or in return for having the charges against them
dropped. In Central Florida, several law enforcement agencies have
pooled their DNA databases. A Baltimore database contains DNA from more
than 3,000 homicide victims.
These law enforcement agencies are no longer content to rely solely on
the highly regulated network of state and federal DNA databases, which
have been more than two decades in the making and represent one of the
most significant developments in the history of law enforcement in this
country.
The reasons vary. Some police chiefs are frustrated with the time it can
take for state crime labs to test evidence and enter DNA profiles into
the existing databases. Others want to compile DNA profiles from
suspects or low-level offenders long before their DNA might be captured
by the state or national databases, which typically require conviction
or arrest.
“Unfortunately, what goes into the national database are mostly
reference swabs of people who are going to prison,” said Jay Whitt of
the company DNA:SI Labs, which sells DNA testing and database services
to police departments. “They’re not the ones we’re dealing with day in
day out, the ones still on the street just slipping under the radar.”
The rise in these local databases has aroused concerns among some
critics, worried about both the lax rules governing them and the privacy
issues they raise.
