Start-up of the criminal genetic database in Mendoza, Argentina

Abstract

The usefulness of DNA databases is widely known and demonstrated. After the successful experiences of the UK and the USA the creation of databases increased rapidly around the world. In Latin America the implementation was slower and more problematic, with Chile and Uruguay being the first to implement them. In Argentina the problems were greater and more persistent.Although the lack of legislation or applicable laws is a generalized problem, the most difficult one to overcome was the lack of decision, interest and resources by those responsible at an institutional level.In 2016, Mendoza province modified its database law by creating the “Registro Provincial de Huellas Genéticas Digitalizadas” which allowed the process of construction and consolidation to begin. From January 2017 all prisoners, convicted and imputed of all types of crimes began to be sampled. This made the database to grow rapidly, reaching 13.821 samples in that year.During 2018, in addition to the daily imputed individuals, we began with the sampling from all the Mendoza Police Department, including the Scientific Police that deals with the crime scene. At present the database has a total of 40.652 individuals.In August 2018, the FBI's CODIS system was installed, and later the data loading process began. In 12 months we have reached 87 match or hits of which 46 correspond to sexual assault, 17 to robbery, 16 to homicides and the rest to other cases. Given that within the sexual abuse cases we were able to identify several serial sexual offenders, the 87 hits allowed clarifying 174 criminal cases.These results reaffirm the potential of the databases and gives a light of hope for victims of crime.In this work we present the advances and challenges that we faced in a chronological order.