SFPD says use of rape victim's DNA in unrelated criminal investigation 'should not have happened'
By J. R. Stone,
ABC News
| 03. 03. 2022
Wednesday night the San Francisco Police Chief responded to some tough questions from police commissioners about the use of DNA from sex assault survivors being used to investigate other crimes.
The chief says that that information is no longer being used, and at this point in time, it only appears to have been used in identifying one rape victim in a property crime case.
"As of now, you don't know of another case but there could be because you haven't finished auditing all the samples is that fair?" asked San Francisco police commissioner Cindy Elias.
"Well yeah that's fair. I don't know of any other case at this point, but we are in the process of going through all the cases," said San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott.
Commissioner Elias asked if the past policies that in at least one case, allowed DNA from a 2016 rape victim to be used in helping identify that victim as a property crime suspect, could have been used in other cases too.
"This was something that should not have happened. As far as...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
