NYPD’s DNA purge
Samples from innocent people being deleted
Police propose purging profiles of 1,845 people never convicted of a crime from the city Medical Examiner’s DNA database, NYPD sources told the Daily News.
Among those 1,845 profiles are an unspecified number belonging to the 360 minority men rounded up as possible suspects in the August 2016 murder of jogger Karina Vetrano in Howard Beach, Queens.
Police were slammed for collecting those samples, and a number of the men claimed they were pressured to give them.
The proposed removal comes amid an NYPD promise to review by year’s end 20,000 DNA profiles that the ME’s office asked police to check because they are more than two years old.
So far, cops have reviewed 4,005 of those profiles. The 1,845 they’ve proposed purging — 46% — are from people not convicted of any crime and are no longer considered suspects.
The remaining 2,160 profiles — 54% — should stay in the database, said police.
Of those, 2,080 were from people ultimately convicted of a crime and another 80 are still under investigation, including six people involved in cases in which victims or witnesses are not cooperating with investigators.
More profiles — maybe thousands of them — are expected to be taken from the database by year’s end as the Medical Examiner and NYPD respond to criticism that its composition violates privacy rights.
City Council members have been talking about legislation to restrict the NYPD’s collection of DNA samples surreptitiously from suspects — such as from beverage cans, coffee cups and tissues they might be given during police interviews.
Council members on Tuesday proposed a bill to bar police from taking samples taken from juvenile suspects.
The ME’s office — which says it has the largest public DNA lab in the world — said in September that it will no longer analyze criminal suspects’ DNA unless police provide other criminal evidence to which it can be compared.
The Legal Aid Society has been pushing for the elimination of the ME’s database because the state already runs a more-regulated DNA database based on criminal convictions.
Removing DNA profiles that shouldn’t be on file to begin with “doesn’t fix the problem — not even close — because state law doesn’t allow DNA indexing of people who haven’t been convicted,” said Terri Rosenblatt, who runs Legal Aid’s DNA Unit.
She said the ME’s cataloguing of DNA evidence is akin to the justice system depicted in the sci-fi flick “Minority Report,” in which people are arrested because psychics believe they’re about to commit crimes.
“We’re not living in ‘Minority Report,’ where we put people in a DNA database before they’re convicted, thinking that one day they might be,” Rosenblatt said.
Police set out new rules for their DNA collection practices over the summer, said Bob Barrows, the department’s director of legal operations.
Consent forms were revised to make it clear that people under questioning have a right to refuse to provide a DNA sample, and to state that the sample “may be used for investigative purposes,” Barrows said.
He also said detectives have been instructed that DNA can only be sought from juvenile suspects in certain felony cases, including gun, sex and hate crimes, and that consent from a parent or guardian is required.
Samples from juveniles can’t be collected surreptitiously, Barrows said.
Police fear City Council restrictions on DNA collection will hinder their ability to solve crimes. Oleg Chernyavsky, the NYPD’s Assistant Commissioner of Legal Matters, said restrictions might lessen cops’ chances of catching a rapist involved in prior unsolved attacks in which police do have DNA evidence.
“There are victims ... crying out for justice in unsolved crimes,” Chernyavsky said. “And there are future victims that haven’t been victimized yet. We stand a chance to prevent their crimes and we’re being denied the ability to do it.”