Are the police obstructive or incompetent then?

[denny]

Dear Meg Hillier,

Thank you for your follow-up reply to my letter asking for information about numbers of Hackney residents whose details are held on the national DNA database. I have a few concerns about the response from the National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA):

1. The NPIA state that they cannot tell where a person on the DNA database lives, only where the sample was taken. This leads me to an obvious question; how do they find and arrest people who are recorded on the database if their DNA matches that taken at a crime scene on a later date? Without this ability the DNA database would be 100% useless, so I find their answer hard to believe.

I would guess, from my limited knowledge, that the DNA database records are related to records on the National Police Computer (NPC) system, which does store addresses. If this is the case then it should be simple for the police to automatically produce geographically-sorted statistics of the kind I requested, and I am surprised that they are not doing so as a matter of course, let alone when requested by a Member of Parliament.

2. The NPIA state that they do hold information relating to the police station and division that took the sample, but again, that they can't relate this to a geographic region. The reason given for not storing this information on the DNA database is that geographic region boundaries shift over time.

Again, I'm sure they do hold this information somewhere (unless we are to believe that they don't actually know where any given police station is on a given day!), and I don't see any reason or excuse in their letter as to why they can't look the relevant information up when a request is made. Again, I would have expected this to be happening on a regular basis, as an automated task, never mind expecting them to manage it on specific request.


It would seem of particular interest for the Metropolitan Police Service to make some effort into more accurate and fine-grain reporting of this kind of information, considering the amount of people from outside of London who are likely to encounter police officers from the MPS while visiting London for various reasons. Indeed, it seems almost negligent that they are apparently not making any effort to compile and track statistics of this type.

Perhaps you could further investigate to find out whether the reasons for the above-mentioned weak excuses are founded in operational laziness or technical incompetence, and follow up either case appropriately? The police forces DO hold all this data. An unwillingness or an inability to 'join the dots' would seem quite worrying under the circumstances.

Yours sincerely,

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