The DNA database is involved in solving only 0.67 per cent of crimes, the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee were told yesterday.

Chris Sims, Chief Constable of the West Midlands and spokesman on the issue for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said that of 4.9 million crimes recorded every year, 33,000 were solved by DNA matches and 45,000 by fingerprints. (The session can he heard here, with Mr Sims’ evidence beginning about 38 minutes in.)
 
Putting this in context, he said that most crimes do not call for sophisticated evidence, but were solved, for example, because victim and perpetrator were known to one another. “In the general terms of crime, DNA plays a small part” he said. “However, if you look at serious crimes it plays a more significant part.” For burglary it was as high as 40 per cent, he said, without providing or being asked for any further evidence to back the claim.
 
The MPs failed to ask what proportion of the 33,000 crime-solving matches came from subject-profiles of people arrested but not subsequently charged or convicted. They had earlier been told by Isabella Sankey of Liberty that such statistics do not exist.
 
Gary Pugh of the Metropolitan Police said the 33,000 figures was an underestimate, because it did not take into account cases with a known suspect where DNA provides corroboration. But that was answering a question the MPs had not really asked. They wanted to know whether keeping innocent people’s DNA on the database solved crimes in the absence of other evidence, by providing matches to new crime scenes.  The session produced no answer.