Protests Curb Racial DNA Sampling
LORRAINE M. BLACKWELL, Associated Press
Chicago Tribune 05/04/2004
Steven Turner wondered who officers were looking for when a police van pulled up as he was riding his bicycle around dusk in his neighborhood near the University of Virginia.
It turned out police were looking for him, in response to a call about "a suspicious person riding a bike."
The University of Virginia graduate student had become the latest target of a DNA dragnet for a serial rapist. In a practice decried as racist, police have stopped nearly 200 black men to ask them for cheek-swab tissue samples.
Turner, 27, said he refused to give the officers a cheek swab that August night, then refused again when police showed up at his home seven months later, because he felt his rights were being violated.
"The question was not my guilt or innocence," Turner said. "I know where my DNA has been."
Police began stopping black men for DNA tests in November 2002, then stepped up the program last year after a victim got a good look at the rapist and described him as a 6-foot black man in his early 20s with an athletic build and unnaturally white, bulging eyes. The rapist is being sought for six attacks in the area between 1997 and 2003.
After black community leaders complained to Police Chief Timothy Longo that the testing amounted to racial profiling, Longo agreed in mid-April to place limits on the tests.
Police can no longer request cheek swabs from black men simply because they look suspicious or resemble a police sketch of the rapist. Officers now must inform the men stopped that they don't have to give a sample. If the men refuse, the officers will need a court order.
In Turner's case, two officers showed up at his home in March requesting a sample again. He contacted Rick Turner, the university's dean of black studies.
"The African-American men in this community had to tell their stories about the humiliation they felt," said Rick Turner, who is not related to Steven Turner.
Not everyone has objected to the testing. The officers "were just doing their job," said Gary Spry, a black barbecue shop owner who has not been stopped.
Longo said last week that Turner is not a suspect.
Turner said authorities need to emphasize the right to refuse.
"They are allowed to use DNA testing," he said. "But they are not allowed to misuse it, and that's what's happening here."