Question

what do you think about criminal cases that are solved by way of genetic genealogy? should criminal investogstors have access to genealogy data bases to solve crimes biolent or non violent? do you think this approach is usedul in deterring people from committing crimes?

Answer 1

Forensic genealogy is the emerging practice of utilizing genetic information from direct-to-consumer companies for identifying suspects or victims in criminal cases. The investigative power of forensic genealogy revolves around the use of open-source databases such as GEDMatch. It should generally be used only for violent crimes such as murder and rape as well as to identify human remains. But first police should exhaust traditional crime solving methods including searching their own criminal DNA databases. It also helps to solve cold cases. It is necessary to correctly interprete the genetic genealogy data so that an innocent person does not fall prey to to law enforcement system. False conviction may ruin the individual's life completely and may affect his/ her status in the society. Any forensics dependent on DNA can fall prey to the same human biases that plague other aspects of law enforcement. Close relatives or even non-relatives can be accused of the crime if care is not taken with how the genetic genealogy is interpreted. Data on the racial distribution of profiles in the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) database suggests that 8.6% of the entire African-American population is present in the database compared to only 2% of the white population. Whereas genetic profiles from direct-to-consumer database and GEDMatch consists of 75% white individuals from Northern European descent. This vast overpresentation in CODIS database has made it relatively ineffective to solve serial murder and sexual assault cases of which the 57% of perpetrators are white and 29% are African-American. So these databases would therefore help to reduce racial disparities in the current criminal justice system. The ever=expanding DNA databases have perpetrators and civil-liberties activists thinking twice about genetics and crime. Forensic researchers believe that use of sophesticated analysis of crime data results in lower recidivism rates. Once a prepetrator knows that the genetic genealogy databases exists and that theya re wary of getting caught this will make them to think twice before committing another crime.