Senior British police have called for a national DNA database after a vicious killer was caught and convicted. Policeman Stuart Cundy, who ran the investigation of the murder of 18-year-old Sally Anne Bowman, said that it would lead to swift justice. "It is my opinion that a national DNA register - with all its appropriate safeguards - could have identified Sally Anne's murderer within 24 hours. Instead it took nearly nine months before Mark Dixie was identified and almost two and a half years for justice to be done."

The government says that it has no plans at the moment to create a compulsory database of every man, woman and child in Britain. However, it has the world’s largest database, 4.5 million profiles, because a sample is taken from everyone arrested for a recordable criminal offence.

A London Telegraph editorial outlined the arguments for and against the proposal. It would certainly allow police to catch criminals swiftly and efficiently. However, the bureaucracy has often showed itself to be incompetent at safeguarding confidential information. "The issue is not the possibility of a colossal state conspiracy to turn us all first into suspects, and then into prisoners, but rather of continual state incompetence... Few of us can have much confidence that they would all treat the information held on a national DNA database in accordance with the highest standards of confidentiality and integrity that would be required to keep the inevitable, inadvertent, abuses to a minimum level." ~ London Telegraph, Feb 24; BBC, Feb 22