Sweden currently has a system where when babies blood are tested, a small sample is kept, recorded, and stored. There are strict rules about viewing access and purpose.
Politicians violated those rules once in late 90s when a high positioned politician was murdered and they wanted to catch the criminal by doing a dna search, which resulted in a match.
From a pure practical perspective, the result of allowing police access to dna databases is that more criminal cases will be resolved than if they aren't, be that a database of rape victims or research database with blood of infants. The biggest ethical problem is that by violating the purpose of those databases, the result might be that people stop volunteering to be in those databases. There are also a slippery slope argument that by allowing police access to the database you are also inviting abuse of the information within in, both legal (in terms of politicians creating new use cases) and illegal.
There is also this icky feeling that comes when people violate the purse of collected personal information for purposes which people have not consented to.
You have the story wrong. There is no searchable database of DNA. There are only blood samples from newborns.
The police wanted access to the sample of a single suspect. The straightforward thing to do would of course have been to get a sample directly from the suspect. But as the case was so high profile and there had just been a public debacle with another arrested and eventually released suspect, the police preferred to risk the integrity of the scientific research project rather than do their job the normal way.
It's infuriating because it was so unnecessary. But police prestige was on the line and here we are.
Politicians violated those rules once in late 90s when a high positioned politician was murdered and they wanted to catch the criminal by doing a dna search, which resulted in a match.
From a pure practical perspective, the result of allowing police access to dna databases is that more criminal cases will be resolved than if they aren't, be that a database of rape victims or research database with blood of infants. The biggest ethical problem is that by violating the purpose of those databases, the result might be that people stop volunteering to be in those databases. There are also a slippery slope argument that by allowing police access to the database you are also inviting abuse of the information within in, both legal (in terms of politicians creating new use cases) and illegal.
There is also this icky feeling that comes when people violate the purse of collected personal information for purposes which people have not consented to.