Forensic labs set to build European databases
Various forensic laboratories in Europe plan to join forces in building databases that can be linked together. This will give the institutes access to European investigative data, enabling the conclusions in reports to be even more effectively corroborated.
ENFSI – the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes – can use European Union subsidies for the project. The Dutch Forensic Institute (NFI) is closely involved in this two-year project, launched at a meeting held last week.
Building up databases
The project will focus initially on the question of which information the laboratories are already using and would like to include in the databases. “This will be followed by the question of what you actually want to use it for and finally by looking at which software will prove most effective for the issues involved”, explains Amalía Brouwer-Stamouli. She is a forensic scientist at the NFI and project manager for one of the databases being created.
The laboratories will also investigate how accessibility to different ENFSI databases can be improved and how they can be linked together.
Purpose of databases
As at other forensic institutes, experts at the NFI use statistical data to corroborate the findings in their investigations. Various areas of research and investigation at the NFI have created databases for this purpose and a large number of countries are already sharing DNA profiles from their DNA databases.
“The more data you can include in a database, the more reliable the conclusions are”, says Brouwer-Stamouli. Strict privacy rules are applied whenever the data is shared. “That is one of the key challenges within the project.”
Likelihood ratios
Last year, European laboratories already agreed to set the same standards for the interpretation and reporting of forensic evidence. For their interpretation and reporting, the institutes will use hypotheses and so-called likelihood ratios, which experts use to make a judgement on the power of evidence. Statistical data held in databases can prove helpful in this respect.