In Search of Our Four Fathers

It appears that for about £100 you can now send off your DNA to trace your ancestry.

I do wonder sometimes why it therefore costs Blandshire Constabulary up to £2000 to send off a DNA swab for comparison against one collected at a crime scene. I am accustomed to hearing from Scenes of Crime Officers (SOCO) the rebuff, "too expensive", when I present them with the missing link in my flawless investigation and ask them to send my suspect to prison please.

When SOCO do agree to analyse my samples, therefore, I am often girlishly thrilled. Sometimes I even throw my hair about, and jump up and down on my cute little toesies. Never more so than when the results actually come back positive. For anyone who doesn't know how this process works, it's something like this:

• SOCO visit a burglary/robbery and collect an amorphous substance from a wall/door/item of clothing.
• The amorphous substance is analysed for DNA.
• If a full DNA profile is obtained, it can then be sent for comparison against the national database. This has the DNA of anyone who's been arrested, plus other samples from other crime scenes that haven't been identified yet.
• If there's a match, I receive instructions to arrest the suspect (by now it is 2 months later, unless it's a murder in which case it miraculously happens in 2 hours).
• Once arrested, I take more DNA from the suspect which goes back off to the lab for comparison with the sample collected from the crime scene. Yes, this does mean doing the very expensive test TWICE, just so no one can argue that the sample we compared the first time belonged to someone who used the defendant's name when they were arrested. Fair enough I suppose.
• All of which means that it will be about 4 months to charge someone with an offence based on DNA.

Surprisingly, I have arrested a fair few burglars who accidentally bled at their crime scenes. In fact, I once arrested a guy who had bled whilst committing three different crimes (years apart) and was identified from his DNA on each occasion. You'd think he'd learn to take bandages with him.

It never stopped him denying he did it, mind you. Right now, the science-sceptics will not convict anyone based SOLELY on DNA evidence. They make you dance through ridiculous circles like proving your suspect wasn't elsewhere on the night in question, or has an identical twin. This kind of nit-picking undermines our glorious legal system and I welcome the day we can convict on the basis that if the person has been arrested before, they must be guilty this time too.

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