Finders keepers - with a teenager’s DNA
Posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 by Home Office WatchCategory: DNA, Police
Police have found a new way to plug those gaps in the DNA database by arresting people for being honest.
Paul Leicester, a teenager from Southport who found a mobile phone and handed it in to the police, was arrested and held at the police station for four hours. He also had his fingerprints, photograph and DNA sample taken. He had been out celebrating his 18th birthday.
From the Crosby Herald :
Paul said, “It’s stupid. Being arrested isn’t a way to celebrate your 18th birthday. What are you supposed to do when you find a phone? I told the last caller I would drop it off at the police station the next day. But they arrested me for theft by finding - shocking.”
Please help our campaign to protect innocent people’s DNA by encouraging friends and family to sign our petition at: http://ourcampaign.org.uk/dna
Related posts:
- No related posts
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:56 am
What exactly is “theft by finding”?
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:00 am
Just goes to show the police want us all on the database so they can control our lives completely.
The only way to defeat them is to challenge them in the European Court it seems. I think it would be useful if more and more people with ‘non-offences’ took the Home Office and the Police to court to have their data removed. it’s the only way to prevent the full development of a police state.
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:29 am
The silly fools in the police have just ensured that no-one else will hand in lost property. Are the educational standards in the police sufficient for the community’s needs?
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:32 am
Words fail me. It’s times like this that I start to see the value of my US cultural conditioning, because my immediate response is “Sue them into bankrupcy.” There’s nothing like the threat of a million dollar lawsuit to put a stop to illiberal nonsense. It may lead to some perverse outcomes, but it does have a clarifying effect on the mind of daft bureaucrats.
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:44 am
I would demand an explanation from the station chief and a demand for your DNA records to be removed. It sounds as if the police didn’t have a reasonable suspicion that you had committed a crime and I would think they have therefore arrested you illegally. Having seen police corruption and incompetance for years, particularly worse since Labour came to power, I would now go for their blood! They’ve taken yours (DNA)! Don’t be frightened by them. Challenge them. Take your father with you if you can for moral support.
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:47 am
Unbelievable.
The Police must be held to account over this and justify themselves to us all. If true somebody isnt doing their job properly and needs to be disciplined.
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Can we please get a definitive statement from the Home Office about this matter? How can anybody be accused of stealing when they hand the object in at the Police Station?
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:07 pm
He can (and should) sue for wrongful arrest, and the idiot who arrested him should be sacked at least, and preferably end up in court for false imprisonment.
Handing in found property is what is expected, and getting arrested for it is absolutely against Human Rights!
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:27 pm
This is absolutely outrageous. I assume he can sue for unlawful arrest, and I would have to agree with KarinJR, that suing them into the ground is becoming the only really effective option.
Perhaps we should start an appeal to fight this case, if the honest, law-abiding victim is willing.
Until a police officer loses their job because of some obnoxious idiocy like this they will continue to do it. So it’s time we make sure they do.
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:50 pm
What became of the ECHR case of S & Marper v. United Kingdom in which the government was defeated on the retention of innocent persons’ DNA? I thought the government only had until March 2009 to respond. The danger in suing the government is that if you lose you may end up paying its costs. In the S & Marper case, the parties were - I believe - legally aided and so shielded from costs awards.
April 3rd, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Matt: “Theft by finding” is where you find something that has been dropped by someone else, and you keep it.
Theft is defined as (something like): “appropriating property with the intent to permanently deprive the owner of it”.
Clearly by handing it in the “intent to deprive the owner of it” fails utterly, and I can’t imagine why they police thought they had any sort of case.
Incidentally, that’s why software/music/video piracy *isn’t* theft - you aren’t depriving the owner of it, as they still have it - taking a copy doesn’t count as theft, it’s just copyright infringement, despite what the industry wants people to think.
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:01 pm
If this is true it must not go unchallenged. The police are our servants but more and more the totalitarian tendencies of this non-accountable government pander to the wishes of the police chiefs to become judge and non existent jury.
How long will it be before all new borns are DNA tested to ensure they can be indentified. We should demand a commitment from all MPs standing for re-election that they would support a law to criminalize such abuses of privilege.
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Just goes to show you can’t be too careful with such issues.
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:25 pm
I have never heard such a proposterous story. Is this Nazi Germany or what.I have often written to the Home Office about various things and I wonder whether thay have collected my DNA from where I licked the envelope. Stranger things happen at see.
It seems to me that the biggest criminals are running the country. I there any way that one can find out whether your DNA is on the database in a false manner?
Mr R W Longhurst.
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Until people start losing their jobs, and having DNA removed as a matter of course, the police and the government can continue to trod all over peoples rights. This chap will now have a nightmare of a time trying to get his details removed from all the police databases, all for being honest. The officer arresting him is obviously incapable of doing his job, so should be fire; I’d also sue him personally for being an idiot, not to mention the stress and ill health it must have caused.
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:23 pm
“Theft by Finding” is (I think) failure to tell police you have found an item within 24 hours of doing so. But such a rule is surely intended to penalise those who intentionally keep something, and it’s use in cases such as this, where the finder has acted entirely honestly, is totally despicable and would seem to be a totally malicious act by the police concerned.
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:00 pm
I’d sue the bastards left right and centre if it happened to me they wouldn’t hear the end of it.
April 7th, 2009 at 2:08 am
I was pulled over on the way back from a night’s babysitting because, unbeknown to me, the front fog lights were switched on on my car. The officer asked if I had been drinking, and I had to say ‘yes’, having consumed about half a glass of red wine. My attempts to get the breaathalyzer to register a reading were thwarted by a well-documented breathing difficulty from which I suffer (COPD), and I was taken back to the local police station.
There I was obliged to give a blood sample (for the alcohol check), finger and hand prints, shoe prints and a DNA sample. In addition mugshots were taken. I was made to feel anything but ‘innocent’.
The alcohol sample came through clear within about three weeks, by which time I hsd contacted my MP, who got in touch with the Chief Constable on my behalf. After a considerable delay, the Police have agreed to delete all the information about me from their records, but it is now four months after the event, and I am still awaiting confirmation that the vital DNA-sample has been deleted. Why it takes this long I cannot imagine.
Altogether a very unsettling experience, which will, I am afraid, colour my perception of the Police for the rest of my life.
May 6th, 2009 at 9:02 am
I thought the law enforcement agencies police by consent in this country? So, why don’t we withdraw our consent.
I hate to say this, but in this country we deserve what we get because the apathy we show is dreadful and if you complain, you are a trouble maker.