Florida's effective DNA database

and it brings a good return for taxpayers.”

The database’s success prompted Cocoa police to sign up to use DNA: SI’s services.

“It’s worked for us in a number of ways. Before, for example, when you arrested a bad guy and found a gun in his car, he could just say it wasn’t his. Now we can prove it’s his and show with DNA sampling that it was in his hand,” said Barbara Matthews, spokeswoman for the Cocoa Police Department.

Cocoa’s program is operating on a one-time $80,000 federal grant. The agency does not have statistics on how many cases have been developed as a result of its testing.

“We’ve been able to send several people back to prison in connection with other cases because of it,” Matthews said.

 

But not everyone is pleased with DNA collections by police agencies.

“Let me be clear, DNA files should not be opened on people who are not convicted of crimes,” said Howard Simon, the executive director of the ACLU of Florida.

 

“I don’t think if you touch a door knob or randomly pick up something that it should be used to open a criminal justice record on you. It’s convenient for police departments, but there needs to be a balance with the rights of citizens.”

Simon said he agrees with the premise but also said police should not be given such a wide berth to collect information on private citizens.

“Of course, DNA can also assist police in doing their job and protect people who might be wrongly accused. But with these records the questions remain, who gets access, how long are they retained?” Simon said.

Blackledge said records are kept within the agency and samples are not collected from people arrested unless they give consent.

“We can’t mandate that anybody give us a DNA sample without a court order or consent,” Blackledge said, but added that acceptable sources for providing DNA evidence can also come from doorknobs and soda cans.

State law permits the collection of DNA from convicted felons, said David Coffman, the chief of forensics for FDLE’s Tallahassee region. Florida began swabbing those convicted of burglary offenses in 2000 and moved to include all convicted felons in 2005.

 

“We’ve had 17,269 (DNA) hits since we began,” said Coffman, whose agency processes about 300,000 items of evidence a year. Coffman said the national database has about 10 million samples taken from convicts and crime scenes.

Palm Bay police point to local “hits” from DNA that solved crimes that might otherwise have been tagged as low priority.

Last August, police were called to a home on the 1100 block of Bianca Drive Northeast to find a knife and a shattered piggy bank lying on a bed. Officers swabbed for evidence.

Within thirty days of the sample being sent to the lab, police were notified about a link to 19-year-old Jerome “JayJay” Jordan, whose profile was in the system from an unrelated collection.

Police took Jordan into custody last month and charged him with burglary and grand theft in connection with $121 in coins taken from the smashed piggy bank.

“The really big part of this is the officers’ acceptance and embrace of this new process and new technology,” Blackledge said.

“The flip side is that it blows my mind that someone watching news about this in the press or talking about it in jail would come to Palm Bay to carry out a crime. Two years ago, we caught 15 out of 16 burglars. Amazing.”