It's also interesting to see how many sample are stored each year - over half a million at the moment. This just reaffirms how many people come into some kind of 'negative' contact with the police during their life time. Presumably each sample stored is new individual so these are not the same people being caught up again and again.
This puts the 'most crime is committed by a small number of individuals' meme in a new light. There is undoubtedly some truth in this claim. But, equally, doing something which leads to an arrest - and a DNA swab - appears to be a pretty common thing (although we should remember that an arrest certainly does not confirm guilt). Outside the 'hardcore' of prolific offenders is a much larger group of people who, perhaps only occasionally, even just once, get arrested.
Media and other representations of 'the criminal' are usually essentialist and of course profoundly negative. Do we really think the 12.5 per cent Northumbrians who have samples stored on the DNA database conform to this stereotype? I doubt it. So how should we think about them and, more importantly, how do we try to ensure that, having been arrested once, they do not go on to be arrested again? Indeed, how do we stop them doing things that might lead to an arrest in the first place? Given these are likely to be, to a large extent, ordinary people, 'lock them up and throw away the key' really shouldn't be an option. So what is?
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