Criminal Genetic Profile Database in Brazil: History and Evolution

Abstract

The impunity has manifested as one of the main motives for the rise in criminality in Brazil, primarily due to the difficulty for the investigative processes to identify a culprit. The lack of data availability and transparency in public security and high rates of under reporting data in official registry are some barriers which difficult evaluating the efficiency of public security politics. Aggravating the situation, samples collected from crime scenes by the Crime Scene Investigators can be subject to a delay in storage in the forensic DNA database, and when they are, in most cases a compatible genetic profile cannot be obtained with those already enrolled, lowering in this way, the national rates in identification of culprits. With this consideration, the article’s objective is to present a historical about the implementation and evolution of the criminal genetic profile database in Brazil. The developmental process of the DNA forensics database reveals an advance in the quality of police investigations, fitting perfectly as physical evidence in the penal process, adding to the load of evidences needed for legal prosecution. Identification techniques for DNA analyses continue to be increasingly employed in Brazil with samples related to biological traces collected in crime scenes, although far from levels reached by countries such as USA and UK whose database reach millions of genetic profiles, reflecting directly in their high culprit identification rates.