The revelation prompted a national outcry from advocates, law enforcement, legal experts and lawmakers. Advocates said the practice could affect victims’ willingness to come forward to law enforcement authorities. Federal law already prohibits the inclusion of victims’ DNA in the national Combined DNA Index System. There is no corresponding law in California to prohibit local law enforcement databases from retaining victims’ profiles and searching them years later for entirely different purposes.
Boudin said the report was found among hundreds of pages of evidence against a woman who had been recently charged with a felony property crime. After learning the source of the DNA evidence, Boudin dropped the felony property crime charges against the woman. The police department’s crime lab stopped the practice shortly after receiving a complaint from the district attorney’s office and formally changed its operating procedure to prevent the misuse of DNA collected from sexual assault victims, Police Chief Bill Scott said. Scott said at a police commission meeting in March that he had discovered 17 crime victim profiles, 11 of them from rape kits, that were matched as potential suspects using a crime victims database during unrelated investigations. Scott said he believes the only person arrested was the woman who filed the lawsuit Monday.
Stef’s Opnion: “That is why you need strong laws in place that prevent this sort of thing. The police just has the wrong mind-set. When your primary focus is solving crime, the idea that some means are not acceptable (as in the case here) is often alien to the people doing it. Hence the police must be carefully limited in what it is allowed to do and carefully monitored. Not doing this leads to a surveillance-state and then then a police-state. Solving all crime is very much not desirable. Reducing crime is something the police and the criminal justice system is generally bad at and has between none and a negative effect on, and hence should only be used as a last line of defense.
Fortunately, in this case the person in charge did see how fundamentally unacceptable the use of the DNA was here, but that will not always be the case.”
