Controversy grows over UK's body of evidence

CHEF MARK DIXIE believed that he had got away with murder until the night he went to watch a World Cup match in 2006 in Sussex and got into a fight. Questioned by police, he gave a DNA swab, writes MARK HENNESSYLondon Editor

Once taken, the swab was run through databases, and quickly linked him to the scene of the brutal murder of 18-year-old Sally Anne Bowman, who was found lying naked on the drive of her Croydon home in south London in 2005.

Dixie knifed the model seven times before he had sex with her as she lay dying, detectives later told his murder trial’s jury, who visibly shrank away from the horrific details as they unfolded in court.

The man who led that inquiry, Det Supt Stuart Cundy, doubts if Dixie would have been caught without DNA evidence and believed then, and now, that every adult should be required to give a DNA sample for police records.

Meanwhile, Steve Wright, the so-called Suffolk Strangler, who killed five Ipswich prostitutes within weeks in late 2006, was captured when DNA found at the scene of one killing was linked to a sample he gave after he stole £40 from a bar till.

Just this week, Glasgow martial arts expert Kevan McDonald was jailed for raping a schoolgirl and a 33-year-old Japanese tourist after police tracked him because his identical twin brother’s DNA was held on file. Such cases support the British police’s practice of taking DNA swabs in minor cases, though the numbers being collected are gargantuan.

Five million samples are now on the register, and the number has grown by 40 per cent in the past two years.

The UK's independent genetics advisory body, the Human Genetics Commission, this week reignited the debate about DNA, reporting the warning of a retired police superintendent who claimed that police are now routinely taking samples to build up intelligence files. In its report, Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear, the genetics body recommends that "unambiguous" rules should be set down in law about how DNA samples are taken in the first place, and then used.

Many of these samples are coming from people who are never charged, let alone convicted, and the practice raises fears that ethnic minorities – principally blacks and Muslims – are being unfairly targeted.

The habit of forces in England and Wales – Scotland has different rules – of keeping the data of innocent people permanently on file has already run into trouble from the European Court of Human Rights, which demanded an end to the practice.

In its judgment, the court said the “blanket and indiscriminate” collection of such records was a “disproportionate interference with the applicants’ right to respect for private life”, as guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights.

In reply, the British government first proposed keeping records for 12 years, and then dropped it to six, though it insists that samples taken from terrorist suspects – whether charged or not – should remain on record forever.

Home secretary Alan Johnson rejected the Genetics Commission’s claim that “large numbers of people are being arrested simply to collect their DNA”, saying that “no substantive evidence” exists to back this up.

“No one can have their DNA taken unless arrested for a recordable offence,” he said, though community worker after community worker insists that the police’s conduct on the street, and particularly on troubled housing estates, is different.

Under legislation announced last week in the Queen’s speech, up to one million people kept on file would have the right to go to court to challenge a police refusal to delete their details, but they would have to pay for the privilege.

Police, meanwhile, would get powers to take DNA and fingerprints from UK nationals who return after serving sentences abroad, while those who committed crimes in the UK in the past and who did not have their DNA taken would now be required to offer up samples.

In Scotland, DNA samples can be taken from people at crime scenes, or more generally, but the records are subsequently deleted if the person is not convicted, except in the case of sexual offences.

DNA record-keeping rules in England and Wales have developed inch-by-inch, without the UK parliament ever agreeing any statutory framework. This, says the Genetics Commission and many MPs, is something that needs to change urgently.

New rules should govern how DNA records can be used, it says, while officers should be prosecuted if they abuse records. Every state official likely to come into contact with a crime scene should also have to offer swabs themselves.

“We have to strike a proper balance between identifying offenders and protecting privacy, including that of innocent people, we should not compromise that privacy without good reason,” said the commission’s chair, Jonathan Murray.

Between April 1998 and September 2009, DNA helped to provide leads to the police in more than 410,000 crimes. The question, doubters say, is whether more DNA records provide more leads.

So far this week much of the attention has centred on the body’s claim that three-quarters of all black males aged between 18 and 35, have had samples taken by the police, amid charges of racism.

The figure is regarded by some other quarters as an exaggeration, but no one is certain by how much. The organisation that oversees the database, the National Policing Improvement Agency, insists the percentage is lower.

However, it does accept that there is “a higher representation of young black males than white males – although they are less likely to commit a crime than young white men” – a fact, like so many other facts, that clashes with popular opinion.