On Monday, the Trump administration announced plans to expand the national DNA databank to immigrants at the border, including asylum seekers, children and people never even accused of a crime.
Most New Yorkers would rightly agree that the Trump policy is outrageous. But our own city has been doing the exact same thing for years. New York City secretly stores our private genetic information without legal authority and ignores the rules and regulations that apply to the national and statewide DNA databanks.
A new bill in Albany would put an end to the city’s brazen and unlawful violation of New Yorkers’ privacy and should be enacted immediately.
NYPD collects DNA from anyone at their unencumbered discretion. They claim to collect DNA methodically, but there is no oversight or regulation to hold them accountable. For example, after taking a 12-year-old boy into custody, the police surreptitiously collected his DNA from a soda straw. Neither the child nor his parent knew about the collection, much less that the city would store his DNA indefinitely. Although the boy was cleared of wrongdoing, his genetic material stayed in the databank.
The city’s rogue DNA collection also included a group of more than 360 black men from East New York and Howard Beach who were targeted by the NYPD in a flagrantly unconstitutional “knock-and-spit” DNA dragnet. Police officers knocked on doors, demanded saliva samples and, in at least one instance, asked threatening immigration questions. Although police admit that the dragnet failed to produce any suspects, the DNA profiles of these men remain in city hands.
Because of the NYPD’s concerted effort to collect genetic profiles on a grand scale, the city has been able to create a rogue database with more than 82,000 profiles, at least 31,400 of whom may never have been convicted of or even charged with a crime and were, at best, suspects when their DNA was deceptively taken. It’s like a permanent police lineup for our most personal genetic information.
New York State is required to openly and transparently report who is in its database and why. The city DNA index is kept under cover. We have no way of knowing how many of those thousands of profiles are from children or people targeted based on the color of their skin. We don’t even know what the NYPD is doing with this private information.
These brazen and unlawful violations of New Yorkers’ privacy must stop. That’s why we recently introduced legislation that will do one simple thing: clarify that New York City and other municipalities are prohibited from establishing and maintaining their own DNA databases.
A well-regulated DNA index can be a useful tool, providing a means to exonerate the wrongfully convicted, as New York legislators acknowledged in 2012 when they expanded the state index to include nearly everyone who is convicted of a crime. But while our elected representatives have decided that people convicted of crimes relinquish their rights to genetic privacy, they have also decided that those merely accused of crimes — and certainly children — do not.
The city’s decision to vastly expand its decades-old DNA index in recent years, while ignoring clearly-delineated state rules, has eroded public trust in over-policed communities while failing to result in any meaningful uptick in public safety. In fact, when comparing the few metrics that are publicly available through the New York State Division of Criminal Justice, the city DNA index creates far fewer leads than the state’s index.
Our legislation will end the unsanctioned practice of DNA indexing from children and from people who haven’t been convicted of crimes. At the same time, it will maintain the effectiveness of DNA indexing and allow local DNA laboratories, like New York City’s, to focus on the important job of testing crime scene evidence.
It’s time to end New York City’s rogue DNA index once and for all.
Hoylman represents parts of Manhattan in the state Senate. Wright represents Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights in the Assembly. Rosenblatt is the supervising attorney of The Legal Aid Society’s DNA Unit.
