Forensic investigators now have 400,000 individual profiles in DNA database

More than 400,000 people have been included in the DNA database for Criminal Cases over the past 30 years. The Netherlands Forensic Institute, which manages the database, reported on Wednesday that this number was passed last summer. Currently, 62 percent of all traces result in a match with a person in this database. According to the NFI, this amounts to 200 to 400 matches per month.

The first Dutch DNA law appeared in 1994, with the first version of a DNA database following three years later, which was also when a person's DNA was stored for the first time. It was a suspect in a severe sex crime case.

Developing the database did not go easily, as the search machine kept getting stuck after entering the first 100 profiles. The current version can compare all saved DNA profiles with each other within seconds.

The database works with numbers and is not a physical place for DNA collection. "Even though the implementation is complex, the premise of the database is simple: sometimes you have a trace in a police investigation, and you don't know who it belongs to. If you include the DNA profile of that trace in the database and compare it with other traces and people, you may find a DNA match. That doesn't automatically mean that you've caught the perpetrator. It's just an indication. Additional police investigation is always necessary," explained the head of the DNA database project, Nico van der Geest.

Since 2005, every person convicted of a crime that requires a jail sentence of four years or more has had to hand over cellular material. In years before, this DNA was only taken from suspects who had eight-year prison sentences or more.

Therefore, the database has grown significantly since 2005. Van der Geest said, "Then we were able to link more and more traces to people, and it really became big."