Creating havoc Father of city’s DNA database rues what it’s become
The architect of New York City’s DNA database now says he is dismayed by what it has become.
Dr. Howard Baum was an assistant director at the city medical examiner’s office in 1998 when he built the system to identify and store DNA samples to help law enforcement investigations.
“We originally had one CODIS terminal, and it was very slow and there was a significant backlog,” he said. “I wanted a database at each analyst’s desk.
You would know very quickly whether it matches or not. It would speed up the justice process and identify serial offenders.”
Baum, however, never envisioned the system would balloon to contain the DNA of 32,000 people.
“We weren’t talking about big groups of people,” he said. “Any person submitted for inclusion to the database had to have been associated with a specific case. And there was no intent of putting juveniles in the database.”
Critics have said the NYPD has added the DNA of teens to the database — a violation of their civil and privacy rights, in their view. A long-awaited City Council hearing on the database is slated for Tuesday. Baum plans to submit written testimony.
Baum said he objects to a police practice of taking DNA from people merely detained without charges or arrested, not convicted of a crime. And he’s concerned about the misleading tactics some cops use to get DNA, such as giving a suspect a soda and then retaining the can for testing. He added that after he left, police involvement in the database increased. Baum also said it’s his perception, based on media accounts, that DNA has at times been taken in a sort of fishing expedition of multiple people not charged with a crime.
He’s also concerned about what he calls “surreptitious sampling” — that people’s DNA can be in the database without them knowing, yet there is no mechanism to either notify them or remove it without a court order.
Most of all, he said, the city should create laws that govern the use and management of the database, rather than continuing to allow the sort of ad hoc self-management by the NYPD and medical examiner that currently exists.
“There are no rules and regulations for the city database, and unregulated data banks have more potential for error,” he said.
An NYPD representative refuted Baum’s observations in a statement to the Daily News. “Since the inception of the local database in 1997 ... there have been millions of arrests and investigations conducted by the NYPD, yet the number of suspect profiles stands at approximately 32,000 . ... If the department was engaged in broad-based ‘dragnets,’ the numbers would undoubtedly be much higher.”
The News previously reported that under pressure from advocates, the NYPD is working on a series of policy changes to make it easier to remove samples from the database and tighten the collection rules for teens. But critics say the changes do not go far enough, nor do they address the sometimes misleading tactics used by the NYPD in collecting the samples.
The medical examiner’s office said the database developed in 1997 was “consistent with federal regulations that require it for participation in the larger federal database. The chief medical examiner has been consistent with legislators and other stakeholders that scientific requirements for testing must be met for every submission.” Baum left the office in 2008. He is now an independent consultant.