Proposition 69: Privacy or safety?

Imagine that the campus police mistakenly pick you up for
shoplifting over $400 worth of BearWear at the campus store and you
are later released without charges. It turns out they were looking
for someone with a similar hair color. Though it is later
determined that you were innocent, at the time of arrest your DNA
was seized and stored in California’s felony criminal
database.

Or here’s another one. You’re celebrating the latest
UCLA football team victory in Westwood. The crowd grows unruly and
begins to throw objects at the police. The police take action and
arrest you even though you were not one of the persons responsible
for throwing objects at the authorities.

At the booking station, the police extract a sample of your DNA
and it is now part of the government’s database set up for
murderers, rapists and child molesters.

This is not a bad dream or even a bad movie. Both of those
scenarios will become likely occurrences if California voters
approve Proposition 69 this November.

Proposition 69 will require the collection of DNA from all
adults arrested for a felony (including minor drug offenses and
non-violent theft offenses), even if you are later proven innocent,
a victim of mistaken identity or never charged with a crime at
all.

Anyone who is adjudicated or convicted for any felony offense,
including shoplifting and writing checks with insufficient funds,
will have their DNA stored in this expanded criminal database
previously reserved for violent felons.

California already requires the collection, testing and storage
of DNA from serious and violent felons, including kidnappers,
rapists, murderers and child molesters. Expanding this huge
database under Proposition 69 to include anyone simply arrested
““ not convicted ““ for any felony offense is an
egregious invasion of privacy.

Each year in California, more than 50,000 felony arrests never
result in the arrested being charged with a crime. Thousands more
are charged and never tried or convicted. Under Proposition 69
these people’s DNA will be taken at the time of arrest, and
their genetic profile will be stored in a vast government database
previously reserved only for violent felons.

This proposition represents a dangerous departure from current
law because it would treat innocent individuals the same as those
convicted for crimes and would put them in the same criminal
records database. This subverts the principle that you are innocent
until proven guilty.

If Proposition 69 passes, it will be up to the innocent person
to get his or her DNA profile removed from the database. The
individual must follow a complicated procedure of petitioning the
court, the Justice Department and the prosecutor. He or she will
also have to furnish proof of innocence.

As if all that weren’t enough, Proposition 69 says the
person’s request can be denied by the court ““ and the
court’s decision cannot be appealed.

A large part of the concern with this initiative is the nature
of DNA itself. Your DNA provides much more than a fingerprint. DNA
exposes the most intimate details of your personal and family
medical history.

Genetic information in the wrong hands can have devastating
consequences. Experts have documented hundreds of cases in which
healthy people have lost their jobs or health insurance based on
genetic predictions.

And in addition to the initiative’s invasion of privacy
and lack of sufficient safeguards for innocent people trapped in
the database, the excessive cost is another reason to vote against
Proposition 69. The American Civil Liberties Union expects
implementation of Proposition 69 to cost the state of California as
much as $100 million a year, diverting already scarce resources
from other law enforcement needs.

Even worse, it could cost tens of thousands of Californians
their freedom.

Ripston is the executive director for the ACLU of Southern
California.