Occurrence of duplicate DNA fingerprints in the NDNAD

Home Office Nid oedd gan y wybodaeth y gofynnwyd amdani.

Dear Sir or Madam,

How many true duplicate DNA fingerprints are there in the NDNAD? I refer not to the 13.7% of entries which are currently ascribed to double-entries of the same individual ("replicates"), nor to the identical fingerprints of twins and triplets, but actual, proven cases of two or more non-identical-siblings having the same DNA fingerprint. Ideally, I would appreciate the information in the form "2,700 known duplicates, 113 triplicates" etc.

To aid you in tracking down this information - this data is probably held by the Data Quality and Integrity Team (DQIT) who work for the NDNAD's Custodian.

It may be that the information is available more readily through the Match Reporting Database (MRDB) or Management Information Database (MID) which were created specifically to get round limitations in the NDNAD. These are anonymised, thus conveniently fall outside the Data Protection Act.

The National DNA Database Annual Report 2004-5 (page 9) makes it clear that when SGS+ was introduced as the DNA fingerprinting scheme, it was not known what the occurrence of duplicates would be and a large scale exercise was in progress to determine this at the time. There was obviously concern at the time over the issue of duplicates. With a database now in excess of 4.6 million fingerprints, and simple statistical analysis, this information is presumably now readily available.

Yours faithfully,

Paul Honigmann

Information Access, Home Office

1 Atodiad

Please see attached the response to your FoI Request.

 

Peter Zebedee | Information Management Service | Financial and Commercial
Group | Lower Ground Floor | Seacole Building | Home Office | 2 Marsham
Street | London SW1P 4DF

dangos adrannau a ddyfynnir

Communications via the GSi may be automatically logged, monitored and/or
recorded for legal purposes.

Gadawodd Paul Honigmann anodiad ()

The Home Office replied, in a timely and polite manner, that they do not hold this information, referring me to the NPIA (National Policing Improvement Agency). I have resubmitted the request to the NPIA, it can be viewed here if you are interested in following this request:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/fr...

I changed the first word of the subject line to avoid confusion with this, the original request to the Home Office.