The California State Senate Public Safety Committee passed a bill forward on Tuesday put forth by State Senator Scott Wiener and San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin that would prohibit law enforcement from retaining the DNA profiles of survivors of sexual assault in a searchable database that could be searched for reasons "entirely unrelated to sexual assault," according to DA Boudin's Office.
Senate Bill 1228, Genetic Privacy for Sexual Assault Victims, unanimously passed its first hurdle and now moves to the senate appropriations committee.
SB 1228 would prohibit a victim's DNA from ever being used for anything other than aiding and identifying a perpetrator, the DA's office said. Law enforcement would be barred from searching not only the DNA database of sexual assault victims, but also their close consensual contacts, family, and housemates who may have provided DNA to differentiate from the perpetrator.
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According to Boudin, federal law already prohibits the inclusion of victim DNA from the national Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. However, there is no corresponding state law in California prohibiting it.
“I was stunned to learn that, right now, a DNA sample from a sexual assault examination can be used to incriminate the survivor in a future crime," said Senator Wiener in a statement. "That is simply unacceptable."
Boudin and Wiener co-authored the bill after discovering that that the San Francisco Police had been retaining DNA collected from sexual assault survivors and then using it for searches unrelated to their assault. Boudin even discovered that DNA from child victims had been kept in the police database, which could theoretically link them to future crimes.
San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott expressed support for the bill in March and opposed the practice of using this DNA for anything other than a victim's sexual assault case, saying that once he found out that DNA was possibly being "misused," he "ordered an immediate change to our crime lab practices, assuring that it doesn't happen again."
