The biggest immediate concern is that familial searches are racially discriminatory. African-Americans represent about 13 percent of the United States population but 40 percent of the people convicted of felonies every year.
Hank Greely of Stanford Law School has estimated that 17 percent of African-American citizens could be identified through familial searches, compared with only 4 percent of the Caucasian population. Is it fair to subject African-American families to disproportionate genetic surveillance simply because one member of the family committed a crime in the past?
Some proponents of familial searches, like Dr. Frederick Bieber of Harvard Medical School, have insisted that "crime cluster[s] in families,” in language that echoes the discredited eugenic family studies of the early 20th century, with their discriminatory emphasis on “genetic criminality.” In a state with a history of tension between African-American citizens and the police, California’s familial searching policy may provoke a debate that makes the one over racial profiling look tame.
Why it's wrong to catch criminals using the DNA profiles of their convicted felon relatives
Law professor Jeffrey Rosen says:
"Can't they both lose?"
ReplyDeleteI'm torn. I'd like to oppose familial genetic searches on general principles of privacy. And even a slight risk of a false positive is a real problem given how much respect juries give to scientific-sounding testimony and "1 in a million" confidence that really isn't.
But if the polity does embrace familial searches, disparate impact is not evidence of discrimination. It may simply be evidence of disproportionate involvement in crime.
In the case the article leads with, authorities caught a suspected serial killer. And the author is agonizing over "discrimination" because more blacks are caught in crimes? If, just IF, blacks actually do commit even slightly more crimes (for whatever reason, even social or economic) than their proportion of the general population, any effective law enforcement tool or policy is going to show a disparate impact. In which case, eliminating "discrimination" in the liberal meaning requires leaving certain criminals on the street to keep the proportions right. Brilliant.
Though I do appreciate how Rosen ends the article. I certainly do agree with limiting testing to convicts and not all arrestees, and only using the database to solve major and violent crimes, not minor ones.
"Though I do appreciate how Rosen ends the article. I certainly do agree with limiting testing to convicts and not all arrestees"
ReplyDeleteIt's worse than that. As far as I can tell, Rosen is fine with the government storing DNA samples of all arrestees. He's saying the expansion of DNA databases to include all arrestees could be put in jeopardy if states insist on searching familial DNA of convicted felons (and therefore familial searches must not be allowed).
The biggest immediate concern is that familial searches are racially discriminatory. African-Americans represent about 13 percent of the United States population but 40 percent of the people convicted of felonies every year.
ReplyDeleteThis is analogous to the argument that enforcing US immigration laws is discriminatory because latinos make up the majority of illegal im
migrants.
It takes a clear pattern of wrongdoing and inverts it, transforming it into wrongdoing on the part of anyone who notices the pattern of wrongdoing.