and allele calling without human intervention. In the
US the promise of on-site DNA analysis has already
altered the way in which DNA could be collected in
future. In a recent decision the Supreme court of the
United States held that ‘when officers make an arrest
supported by probable cause to hold for a serious
offense and bring the suspect to the station to be
detained in custody, taking and analyzing a cheek
swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and
photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure’
(Maryland v. Alonzo Jay King, Jr.). In other words, DNA
can be taken from any arrestee, rightly or wrongly
arrested, as a part of the normal booking procedure.
Twenty-eight states and the federal government now
take DNA swabs after arrests with the aim of comparing
profiles to the CODIS database, creating links to unsolved
cases and to identify the person (Associated Press, 3 June
2013). Driven by the rapid technological progress DNA
actually becomes another metric of quick identification. It
remains to be seen whether rapid DNA technologies will
alter the way in which DNA is collected by police in other
countries. In Germany for example the DNA collection is
still regulated by the code of the criminal procedure and
the use of DNA profiling for identification purposes only
is excluded. Because national legislations are basically so
different, a worldwide system to interrogate DNA profiles
from criminal justice databases seems currently a very distant
project.