The claim
“Immigration has had a dramatic effect on Britain’s rising crime rate. According to official figures, over 77 percent of adult black males between the ages of 18 and 35 are on the police’s DNA database”
British National Party Manifesto 2010
The background
It’s a statistic that gets used a lot – 77 per cent of young black men are on the national DNA database (NDNAD). But is the statistic accurate and – if immigration is to blame – what percentage of those on the database are not British citizens?
The national DNA database stores DNA samples collected at crime scenes and from people in police custody. Everyone who is arrested now has their DNA taken. As such, it is possible to have one’s DNA on the database without being convicted of a crime. (An individual must apply to a chief constable if they want their DNA removed from the NDNAD.)
FactCheck has looked at this issue before. We found then that the number of samples does not equal the number of people on the database (because some people are arrested more than once) and that the way a suspect’s ethnicity is recorded (it is simply guessed at by a police officer) differs from the way the census records it (by self-reporting, and with a much wider range of racial categories).
Thus it is not possible to accurately compare the number of samples on the database given by young black men with the total number of young black men in the country as a whole.
We sought out more up to date figures to see if anything had changed.
The analysis
In December a Home Office written answer stated that at 16 October last year 193,593 black males aged 18-35 were on the DNA database.
Home Office minister Alan Campbell confirmed that ethnic data is still based on the judgment of the police officer and is recorded for police intelligence purposes to assist in subsequent identification.
The minister also confirmed that the information held on the database is not directly comparable with census population data.
Police officers record a suspect’s ethnic appearance under one of seven categories: unknown; Asian; Black; Chinese, Japanese other SE Asian; Middle Eastern; White – North European and White – South European. As such, it seems likely that they frequently get it wrong, especially as there is no mixed race category. (In fairness to the police, the aim is to help them identify suspects in future, not to make accurate demographic assessments.)
In contrast, the 2001 Census records ethnicity broken down into: White; Mixed; Asian or Asian British; Black or Black British and Chinese or Other Ethnic Groups and then several other more specific categories within those broad ones.
Campbell estimates a duplication rate of 13.8 per cent as a result of some suspects giving more than one sample when arrested at different crime scenes.
Campbell concluded that the DNA database figures are a snapshot of the records at a single point in time. The data is considered management information and has not been formally assessed for compliance with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.
Nevertheless, a figure of 77% of young black males on the database continues to be cited, including to the House of Commons Home Affairs select committee, who published a report in March.
The original source seems to be a Telegraph article from November 2006 which states that:
“An estimated 135,000 black males aged 15 to 34 will be entered in the crime-fighting- database by April, equivalent to as many as 77 per cent of the young black male population in England and Wales. By contrast, only 22 per cent of young white males, and six per cent of the general population, will be on the database.”
Henry Potts, a lecturer at University College London cited in the Telegraph article, told FactCheck:
“The main fallacy in the BNP’s argument is that the DNA database includes vast numbers of innocent people. It tells you something about who the police arrest, not about who commits crimes… For the BNP to call that “official figures” is nonsense. Alan Campbell’s written answer raises further issues that I don’t think we’d considered at the time, making 77% even less accurate.”
According to Dr David Owen, of Warwick University’s Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, “the Census certainly underestimates the young black male population, probably by 20 per cent, and other sources of this data such as the Labour Force Survey and Annual Population Survey experience a high failure rate in contacting black men and are therefore also likely to undercount.
“These figures all still seem tremendously high to me. I would assume that the number of duplicates is much higher than the figure you have obtained [from Alan Campbell’s written answer].”
If Dr Owen is right and the census significantly underestimates the total number of young black men then the guesstimate that 77% of them are on the DNA database is even more likely to be over calculated.
The BNP’s broader argument was about immigration and its impact on Britain’s rising crime rate. As FactCheck has shown before, it depends on which set of statistics you use to show whether or not crime has increased in recent years. In general, the British Crime Survey is considered the most reliable method of measuring trends in crime and it has shown a drop in overall crime over the past decade.
The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) has responsibility for the DNA database. A spokesman confirmed to FactCheck that they do not record whether or not an individual on the database is an immigrant.
In response, the BNP told us that that “all black people in Britain are of immigrant stock.”
They also cited the NPIA website that “DNA samples are currently taken from anybody arrested for a recordable offence… In practice they include any offence punishable with imprisonment and some additional offences specified [in National Police Records].”
The verdict
The BNP blames immigration for rising crime and cites statistics about the proportion of young black men on the national DNA database as evidence.
The claim that 77% of young black men are on the national DNA database is wholly insupportable. The ethnicity of individuals is judged by police officers to standards that are far from exacting. There are duplicate samples on the database and the figure of 77% is an extrapolation from already unreliable figures.
Moreover, the BNP’s manifesto does not make clear that a person does not have to have been found guilty to have their DNA taken, nor that their DNA sample(s) can be retained on the database after they have been found innocent.
