Privacy Digest

Sheriff wants 30,000 more on DNA databank - Via Charlottesville Daily Progress:

As one veteran lawman sees it, the DNA databank has been the most significant crime-fighting innovation in his 30-odd years wearing a badge.

Virginia’s DNA databank has been a leading model nationwide; in 1989, the state became the first to create such a databank, and recently marked its 5,000th “cold hit.”

Albemarle Sheriff J.E. “Chip” Harding helped improve the state’s databank last year when legislation he pushed for helped ensure that thousands of felons who had slipped through the cracks would be entered into the system. That legislation helped put another 11,000 felons in the databank, and now there are about 280,000 profiles in the databank, which can be run against unsolved cases and new ones that pop up.

Harding said he thinks the databank can be even better, and he is gearing up to push an effort that could add thousands more DNA profiles to the system. His enthusiasm to expand the databank is not shared by privacy rights advocates.

The sheriff hasn’t hammered out all the details, but he continues work on a position paper focusing on two issues:

l He wants to include felons from before 1990 in the DNA databank, which he estimated could add as many as 30,000 profiles. Current law includes only felons arrested or incarcerated after 1989; and

l He wants anyone arrested for a misdemeanor (except certain cases such as minor traffic offenses) to provide DNA for the databank, as they already do with fingerprints.

“My mission is, I’m trying to get that discussion on the table,” Harding said.

The sheriff said he isn’t yet prepared to argue his case for the changes, but he knows he’ll face opposition, especially against his wish to include all arrestees in the databank. Editor: Emphasis added.

The American Civil Liberties Union indeed takes issue with Harding’s plans, as it does with the DNA databank as a whole.

Kent Willis, executive director of the Virginia ACLU, said, “For us, it’s a privacy issue” and collecting data from anyone “is indeed invading individuals’ privacy.”

He called Harding’s idea of expanding the databank a “dangerous, slippery slope.”

“There is a natural tension between being a government official and protecting individuals,” Willis said, adding that there needs to be watchdogs, such as the ACLU, protecting individuals’ freedom.

(Read Original Article - Via Charlottesville Daily Progress .)