California will adopt the most aggressive approach in the nation to a crime-fighting technique that uses DNA to try to identify elusive criminals through their relatives, state Attorney General Jerry Brown announced Friday.
Using what is known as familial or “partial match” searching, the policy seeks to find an unidentified suspect through DNA found at a crime scene by looking for potential relatives in the state’s genetic database of about a million felons. Once a relative is identified, police can use that person as a lead to trace the suspect.
The new plan makes California a leader in such searches, which several states permit but do not vigorously pursue. Colorado recently has begun to examine its database for relatives of unknown criminals as part of a research project.
Brown said the new approach was justified by violent crime plaguing the state. He emphasized that it would be used only when all other leads had been exhausted.
“We have 2,000 murders a year in California — that is 10,000 since the Iraq war started — and that is a lot of killing,” Brown said. “When you see it and see the victims and have to go to funerals, it is pretty serious stuff.”
The policy, which takes effect immediately, is designed to work like this: The state’s crime lab will tell police about DNA profiles that come up during routine searches of California’s offender database and closely resemble, but do not match, the DNA left at a crime scene. (Previously, the state has refused to tell police about these partial matches.)
The lab then will do calculations and tests to determine the likelihood of a biological relationship between the person found in the database and the unknown offender believed to have left DNA at the crime scene.
When such partial matches do not surface or fail to produce a lead, a more customized familial search can be done in which computer software scans the database proactively for possible relatives. The software measures the chance of two people’s being related based on the rarity of the markers they share.
Once a relative has been identified, police can interview him or construct a family tree based on existing records. If a suspect is identified, police can obtain a warrant for his DNA or even gather it from an abandoned drink or cigarette butt. The suspect’s DNA sample then would be compared to the crime scene sample and possibly used as evidence.
Tania Simoncelli, science adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, called Brown’s decision a “disappointment” and said the organization was exploring its legality.
“The fact that my brother committed a crime doesn’t mean I should have to give up my privacy,” she said.
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