Time to stop the colour blindness
Nov 26 2009 By Adrian Goldberg
THE police have been castigated by a government watchdog for making arrests with the sole purpose of garnering DNA – with young black men, in particular, liable to having their collars felt and samples taken.
I thought that after the Handworth riots of the 1980s (which were, of course, repeated elsewhere in England) we’d moved beyond the point where cops thought it was OK to harass people purely on account of their skin colour.
Apparently not.
More than three quarters of black blokes aged between 18 and 35 are now on the national DNA database, provoking the suspicion that one section of our community is being victimised.
It’s as though the McPherson Report into the death of Stephen Lawrence, which identified the problem of “institutional racism”, never happened.
Banning the collection of DNA from anyone who has never been convicted would go some way to easing the fear that particular ethnic groups are being unfairly targeted.
That’s what Britain was ordered to do a year ago by the European Court of Human Rights, but ministers continue to drag their feet.
Despite all the heat it’s brought them, you can understand why. Like it or not, DNA has already brought thousands of villains to book – and helped clear numerous innocent people too.
It’s not infallible, but most crime experts rate it as one of the finest crime fighting tools available, which has been instrumental in solving some West Midland cases which had previously been thought would never be resolved.
Would any responsible government turn its back on evidence capable of solving some of the most heinous crimes?
The answer to this conundrum surely lies not with collecting fewer DNA samples but gathering more.
I’d start with all new-born UK citizens and every arrival from abroad – and then, finally, the rest of us could be incorporated onto the database.
I can already hear civil liberties campaigners spluttering into their fair trade skinny lattes, but as Tony Blair once observed there is no greater human right than living free from the fear of crime.
A comprehensive national DNA database sadly wouldn’t guarantee an end to violence in our homes and on our streets, but it might act as a deterrent and would certainly make it easier to identify the culprits.
It should also reduce the need for random stop and search with all the resentment it breeds.
DNA, unlike our police force, is colour blind.
