Give the government my DNA?

If allowing the government to develop a national DNA database as a crime-fighting tool is the brilliance that Yale Law School is supposed to produce in its students, then an Ivy League education is REALLY overrated, except for post-graduation job bucks.

Beyond that ignoring of civil liberties issues, Michael Seringhaus undercuts his own argument:

Several states, including California and Colorado, have embraced a controversial new technique called familial DNA search, which exploits the fact that close relatives share substantial fractions of their DNA. If efforts to find a DNA match come up empty — that is, if the perpetrator is not yet profiled in the database — the police in these states can search for partial matches between crime-scene samples and offenders in their record base. If they find a partial match, they can zero in on relatives of the profiled person as possible suspects.

This sounds elegant, and it occasionally works: in Britain, a handful of high-profile cases have been solved using familial search. But this approach is crippled by a very high false positive rate — many partial matches turn up people unrelated to the actual perpetrator. And it raises serious legal questions: how can we justify the de facto inclusion in DNA databases of criminals’ family members who have been neither arrested nor convicted?

So, if a partial noncriminal DNA database, and at just a state level, has such problems, why wouldn't a national one, of everybody, be even worse?

But, Seringhouse plods on right into another mistake:

A much fairer system would be to store DNA profiles for each and every one of us. This would eliminate any racial bias, negate the need for the questionable technique of familial search, and of course be a far stronger tool for law enforcement than even an arrestee database.

Ahh, to the degree we can accurately talk about races, there are genetic differences. If an FBI agent, say, who has been trained in DNA analysis, wants to do that, he or she can still engage in some sort of racial profiling.

After that partial ignorance of DNA issues, he then falls short on criminology:

A universal record would be a strong deterrent to first-time offenders — after all, any DNA sample left behind would be a smoking gun for the police — and would enable the police to more quickly apprehend repeat criminals. It would also help prevent wrongful convictions.

We have plenty of deterrents today, or deterrents to the logical mind.

Criminals don't act logically.

And, Mr. Selinghouse needs more lessons in that too.