Originally posted by StarChild
This reminds me of the movie "Minority Report", where they try to catch people before the act is actually committed.

Yep. Thought police. Absolute worse turn that law enforcement can take...

and this is very close.

When a part of a person's body, their DNA, is taken to compare against a crime scene, it is done so only when sufficient burden of proof has been met to justify the invasion of self and the invasion of privacy. It is part of an interrogation. Questioning, evaluation, and testing are all parts of an interrogation. So by taking this DNA from innocent children they are subjecting them to interrogation, without knowledge or consent, every time a computer compares their sequence to a sample. No court order, no warrant, not even probable cause. Just, "Johnny had trouble making friends when he was five."

Since 2004 police have had the power to take DNA samples from anyone over the age of 10 who is arrested, regardless of whether they are later charged, convicted, or found to be innocent.

I don't know about anyone else, but if I'm going to get screwed by the Government I'd at least like to leave the light on.

This is a sign of a dead society. Imagine people of the past, the American Indians which I respect, doing this to their children, considering them "probable" criminals before everything else

I say let's make no more children they could become criminals ! Better yet, let us kill ourselves, we could become criminals one day !

I personally will not be submitting to the demand for my DNA either to prove my innocence or guilt. If they want some of my blood, they're gonna have to give some of theirs first.

I find this sad and insanely angering..

But the fact that most people will see this as a GOOD thing makes me even sadder.

Minority Report here we come. *sigh*

Why in the hell do so many people let so few make all decisions.....Fight back! If you can inflict enough pain, than the powers that be will get the message...The UK is nothing more than a prison state...We at least keep our inmates behind bars..In the UK everybody is a inmate.

I believe this is just going tooo far! (along w/ alot of other things)

Governments are there to run a country for the people THEY serve.

Now the government wants to collect DNA from the people they are working for's children, who are innocent, and HAVEN"T commited a crime, "just in case" they commit a crime.

It's just NUTS!


[edit on 17/3/08 by Keyhole]

What might constitute a child that has a high probability of being a criminal and being sentanced to prison?
Would being NINE times more likely than thegeneral population to be sentanced to prison be enough cause to DNA sample a child?
You say yes? O.K. We'll DNA sample all Negro children. (Ten percent of America's population, Negros occupy fifty percent of America's prison cells.)
But that's racist!
No that's "SCIENTIFIC".
Wait untill the NAACP hears this proposal.


What really scares me about these DNA conviction reversals of the long imprisoned, is that these cases are ONLY drawn from the rape and homicide convictions. What scares me is that there must be the same high rate of wrongfull convictions for ALL crimes, resulting in the imprisonment of innocents and the wasting of valuable cell space, while the real perpetrators laugh up their sleves at the dumb coppers and go merrily on their way to commit more crimes.

Perhaps when we discover one of these false convictions we should sentance the prosecutor to serve the same sentance as the wrongfully convicted person? It might make prosecutors a little less eager to get a conviction in weak cases.

I'm sure there are many people who will go along with the idea of DNA sampling kids and everyone else. They will just because they want to express control over others or because of a holier-than-though attitude they foster. Such people are very dangerous and the policeman who has put forth this idea is very dangerous too. This idea will have been discussed/debated beforehand and will have now been said publicly only to test the water and calculate implementation.

Does anybody actually know what constitutes a crime? Dictionaries will give many similar definitions but try to define "crime" without a dictionary. What constitutes a crime against you, against society, against your neighnour? The words "crime" and "criminality" (as commonly used) are abstractions based on arbitrary reasoning of courts, government and society as structured by their civilisation (think historically). It wasn't so long ago that someone would be locked-up for onanism (self-abuse) or imprisoned for blasphemy and other "crimes" that concerned no actual, physical harm, intimidation or lessoning of life quality to others. It's still the case today even though today's "crimes" are different to those of 10, 20, 30, 100 years and more ago. The meaning will be different in the future too.

I'm sure there are many modern "crimes" that you don't feel apply to you or that you don't feel are real "crimes." I feel the same way myself. Just try to explain to a judge or policeman the reason you feel like that...they have a job to do and they will do it whether they agree with it or not because the responsibility is deferred elsewhere i.e they are absolved of the guilt of any wrongdoing they feel.

Society can suffer hysteria and as such can be very fickle at times. Hysteria is one of the driving forces behind society's quick changes: some of them good, some of them bad. This hysteria is usually called a "knee-Jerk" reaction.

Because neither YOU nor I can choose society's definitions of "crime" and "criminality" nor the punishments merited we all need to be careful about how we are tracked and who we let track us.

DNA is no simple matter. How long before our DNA can be sampled from a distance (without physical sampling)? How long before our presence can be monitored through remote DNA sniffing? What if a component of our DNA becomes illegal? Many will say that the DNA that causes homicide, bestiality or rape should be excised of the human genome but to do that would make us less than human. Some people murder to self-protect, some rape to procreate, some have intercourse with animals for who knows what reason (possibly to show dominance or to prevent rape of another human). The point is that nature made us as we are for a reason and it isn't for us to reason that we no longer need those behaviours. What if we have a near extinction level event? We can't judge survivors and we can't determine the behavours they will need to survive.

I know I may have come across as patronizing but I hope I have helped the less informed and the more ignorant understand the issues at stake.