AKA fishing

If done right, spear fishing.

I'm a privacy guy, but the science really is there to use DNA to narrow a list of suspects. You can't say the same for much of forensic science, or for that matter mass surveillance technologies.

However, the list of suspects can still lack the actual criminal(s), but still contain an innocent with poor, but true alibi.

Here's an actual case of an innocent person who faced charges and a high probability of losing their freedom due to DNA transference:

https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/

The take-away is that shed skin cells containing DNA can migrate and a DNA match from that type of evidence shouldn't be relied on as proof of anything.

To my view, the combination of DNA transference, advancing DNA collection / analysis techniques, the mere existence of DNA databases, and familial searches are absolutely terrifying.

Good counterpoint, definitely an issue. When the police find macroscopic quantities of bodily fluids, however, it would seem to be madness not to use the evidence.

Absolutely.

I do question if society is better off catching a few more criminals through these databases and familial matching vs the potential for innocents to be imprisoned based on nothing more than a DNA match against skin cells.

I'm also not too fond of the idea of my relatives' DNA being used to draw suspicion to another relative just because someone's DNA wound up in a database. To me it's just another one of those things (ALPRs, all the compilations of "it's just metadata") that erode our privacy and give the state a great deal of power for relatively little benefit to the people.

All crimes don't get solved, all criminals don't get caught, and in a society where everyone's a law-breaker because there are too many laws to know them all and so many of them are dumb, that's how things should be.

"Fishing" in police work is kinda the opposite:

You investigate someone, hoping to find some law they might have broken.

This is trying to find out who committed an already known serious crime. That's just "police work", in my view.

Except of course that possibly the only link between the suspects and the crime is the DNA, they may not have committed anything.

But once such a suspect is lined up the search is over and all that will happen is to look for confirmation rather than exculpation.

Any suspect can always be innocent.

There is nothing special about DNA evidence that makes it worse or better in that regard.

You dont have a warrant to find those peoples things.

Get a warrant before searching for each persons DNA, not search each persons DNA then get a warrant