Chloe Xiang reports:
The Queensland, Australia police have used DNA phenotyping for the first time ever in hopes of leading to a breakthrough for a 1982 murder.
The department partnered with a U.S.-based company called Parabon NanoLabs to create a profile image of the murder suspect, a Caucasian man with long blonde hair. Police claim that this image was generated using blood samples found at the scene of the murder of a man from 40 years ago; according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation this is the first time “investigative genetic genealogy” has been used in Queensland.
Read more at Vice.com.
Narrowing a pool down to 15,000 people is not narrow enough to prevent surveillance and privacy abuses as far as some of us are concerned. As quoted in the reporting:
“Broad dissemination of what is essentially a computer-generated guess can lead to mass surveillance of any Black man approximately 5’4″, both by their community and by law enforcement,” Callie Schroeder, the Global Privacy Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Motherboard in October in regards to a suspect profile created by Parabon that was released by the Edmonton Police Department in October. “This pool of suspects is far too broad to justify increases in surveillance or suspicion that could apply to thousands of innocent people.”