During a search of a San Francisco police crime lab database, the woman’s DNA was linked to a burglary in late 2021. Her DNA had been collected and stored in the system as part of a domestic violence and sexual assault case in 2016, then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin said in February in a shocking revelation that raised privacy concerns. “This is government overreach of the highest order, using the most unique and personal thing we have – our genetic code – without our knowledge to try to link us to crime,” said the woman’s lawyer, Ade Pointer, in a statement. The revelation sparked a national outcry from advocates, law enforcement, legal experts and lawmakers. Advocates said the practice could affect victims’ willingness to come forward to law enforcement. Federal law already prohibits the inclusion of victims’ DNA in the national combined DNA marker system. There is no equivalent law in California that prohibits local law enforcement databases from keeping victim profiles and looking them up years later for entirely different purposes. California lawmakers last month approved a bill that would ban the use of DNA profiles collected by police from sexual assault survivors and other victims for any purpose other than to help identify the perpetrator. Local law enforcement agencies would also be prohibited from retaining and then researching victims’ DNA to incriminate them in unrelated crimes under the legislation, which is pending before Gov. Gavin Newsom. Boudin said the report was found among hundreds of pages of evidence against a woman who had recently been charged with felony property. After learning the source of the DNA evidence, Boudin dropped the felony charges against the woman. The police department’s crime lab stopped the practice shortly after receiving a complaint from the district attorney’s office and formally changed its operating procedure to prevent the misuse of DNA collected from sexual assault victims, Police Chief Bill Scott said. Scott told a police commission meeting in March that he had discovered 17 crime victim profiles, 11 of them from rape kits, who were matched as possible suspects using a crime victim database during unrelated investigations. Scott said he believes the only person arrested was the woman who filed the lawsuit Monday. The woman filed the lawsuit under the pseudonym Jane Doe to protect her privacy, Poyder said, adding that The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they choose to be named. California allows local law enforcement crime labs to operate their own forensic databases that are separate from federal and state databases. The law also allows municipal labs to perform forensic analysis, including DNA profiling, and use those databases — without regulation by the state or others.
