Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
The San Francisco Police Department includes DNA collected from rape kits in the database it uses to identify crime suspects, District Attorney Chesa Boudin said on Monday. The practice likely is illegal under the California Constitution, Boudin told The Washington Post.
The district attorney’s office discovered the practice when reviewing the case of a woman arrested for property crime. She was identified as a suspect based on a DNA sample collected during a rape investigation in 2016. Searches that include genetic information from rape investigations are done regularly, the crime lab confirmed to Boudin.
Use of this type of data could violate the California Constitution, which requires property be returned to victims when it’s no…
