Forensic Genetics and the Prediction of Race: What is the Problem?

• In Event: 4157 - Regular session: Racism and Antiracism I

Abstract

A new wave of innovations in forensics seeks to support criminal investigations by making inferences about the appearance of as yet unknown suspects using genetic markers of phenotype or ancestry. These developments currently allow the prediction of a number of traits including hair colour and eye colour but the prediction of race and ethnicity has excited the most controversy. This controversy and the potentials of race prediction must be understood in the context of the troubled history of police-minority relations. Just as significantly they should also be located in a wider account of recent changes to ͚race͛ as an object of knowledge and expertise in science, policy, and politics. Existing national police forensic DNA databases are racialized in varied ways; their operation, outcomes, and accompanying ethical frames suggest an ambiguous relationship between explicit race talk and patterns of discrimination. By openly mobilising race and ethnicity, however, predictive techniques raise new questions about the validity, interpretation, dissemination, and application of results. Moreover, other developments in policing socio-technologies, which place greater emphasis on the use of data in general and digitized facial images in particular, also heighten the visibility and valorisation of racial difference. In the resulting conjunction of digital and genetic elements lies a paradox: race has an enduring power as a means of describing and stigmatizing groups but that very power makes it hard to transition effectively from moments of collectivisation to the identification of individual suspects.

Author

• David Ian Skinner, Anglia Ruskin University