Because the Police now perceive the need to drag just about everyone and their dog into the Police Station for DNA sampling, the two pages of caution urged upon the Police in the Police and Criminal Evidence ACT (PACE) before taking such a drastic step are now routinely thrown into the wind by the Police who are taught by their superiors to always quote the one get out clause known as " “The necessity for a prompt arrest” even when these arrests happen days after aledged incidents and the identities of the people thus inconvenienced and stigmatized are pecfectly well known to the Police. Not only does this break the third principle of the Data Protection act 1998, at a local level this totally undermines confidence in the Police and kills any community policing initiatives, where the Police tries to mediate instead of being so heavy handed. Join discussion...

Some commentators say "he has lost the plot". I say spot on David Davis for mentioning as an example of the erosion of our civil liberties the abominable national DNA data base. Join discussion...

Today the BBC was awash with a news story about two men fighting at the European Court of Human Rights, to have their DNA removed from the UK's National Crime Data Base. In ‘The ONE show’ they interviewed the father of a murdered girl Sally Anne Bowman. Of course you will win the public’s sympathy vote that way, but laws made in over-reaction to dramatic events like the Soham Murders, the Ipswich murders and this girl's case later come back and bite us in the bum. The Police forget the mention constantly that the murderers they find that way are convicted murders who should be on that data base. How many crimes were solved by matching DNA to innocent people who happened to be on this data base for all the wrong reasons? http://www.bbc.co.uk/theoneshow/article/2008/02/jr_dna.shtml Join discussion...