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    The stockpiling of DNA samples from suspects and convicts has become the norm in many states. Even the liberal governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, recently proposed expanding the DNA database there to include individuals convicted of misdemeanors such as minor drug violations and unlawful credit card use. Virginia also collects the DNA of nonviolent offenders, and Louisiana requires samples from those who are simply arrested for a felony. Previously, DNA had been collected only from those found guilty of the worst crimes. Spitzer’s proposal is supposed to make it easier for prosecutors to lock up more criminals and for the wrongly accused to prove their innocence. But given the racially biased arrest and conviction patterns of New York and other states across the country, the consequences are likely to disadvantage people of color.

As databases mushroom, the development of genetic racial profiles may be the next wave in law enforcement. DNAPrint claims the ability to use DNA to “predict” physical features such as skin and eye color, adding more and more detail to a genetic sketch. Their web site boasts 100 percent accuracy in blind, company-administered tests. But one critic pointed out that since the test that identified the Baton Rouge killer estimated the percentage of ancestry from four groups that mostly include dark-skinned individuals (sub-Saharan Africans, East Asians, Indo-Europeans, Native Americans), any prediction would inevitably fall into one or more of those ethnic groups. The company provides a separate screening test for additional groups, such as Northwestern and Southeastern Europeans, Middle Eastern and South Asian, but less commonly.

As federal dollars continue to flow to research on the genetic basis for certain racial disparities…race as a biological fact becomes more solidified in public consciousness, and the socioeconomic factors in disease get obscured.

Such racialized forensics presents multiple problems for people of color. It blurs the line between DNA tests that can definitively rule out suspects (as in the Innocence Project) and less certain analyses that “predict” or state the probability of a match. It gives scientific legitimacy to the widespread but still controversial notion that certain genetic differences, or markers, correlate precisely with geographic regions and modern racial categories. Further, it makes acceptable manhunts for “ancestry informative markers,” a euphemism for racial identifiers in genes despite the many pitfalls of old-fashioned racial profiling. Worse still, it creates a market for a growing list of genetic services that may, at best, be good guesses but not definitive.

Critics fear that such questionable science in criminal justice will inevitably lead to searches for gene markers for criminal behavior. If criminologists start with a database that is disproportionately Black and Latino because of police practices that target those communities, any computer-generated findings will be skewed. “What you’re dealing with is a population in the database which is distorted,” says Troy Duster, a sociologist and chancellor’s professor at UC Berkeley. “So if someone wants to do this kind of research, they’ll look for genetic markers. What they’ll find, of course, are certain markers. Tell the program to find markers and you can find markers in DNA that may be more or less likely to appear in populations A, B or C. But it will be a huge mistake to conclude that because you have those markers you’ve explained crime.”

The ever-expanding databases give law enforcement a powerful, high-tech tool. With each DNA sample, government seizes personal biographical information, stripping citizens of their privacy rights. Since each sample offers clues not only about individuals but their relatives as well, entire families are open to scrutiny. In some cases, once a DNA sample is taken it is not destroyed or returned but stored indefinitely, unless the law in a particular state stipulates otherwise.

MEDICAL RESEARCH
Genetic science is similarly double-edged in the realm of health research. As scientists were busy mapping the human genome in the early ‘90s, for the first time the government moved to mandate that all federally funded biomedical and behavioral research include members of historically excluded groups: minorities and women. After decades of research on mostly white, male subjects, this development—pushed both by Black politicians and women scientists—was generally hailed as an advancement. Documenting health disparities is indeed an imperative, given the much higher rates of disease and mortality from disease among ethnic minority groups in the United States.