The British police minister says a “human error” caused hundreds of thousands of DNA records and other data on criminal suspects to be deleted from the national police computer
LONDON – The British police minister said on Monday that “human error” had caused hundreds of thousands of DNA records and other data on suspected criminals to be erased from the national police computer.
Kit Malthouse told lawmakers in the House of Commons that the setback occurred during a “regular cleaning process” on the computer, which has 13 million records. He said about 400,000 records were erased, including 213,000 crimes and 170,000 arrests.
“Obviously this situation is very serious,” Malthouse said, adding that “we will know the extent of the impact of this issue over the next few days.”
Labor lawmaker Yvette Cooper said it was “very difficult to understand how 400,000 records could be removed from such a crucial system without a proper backup system.”
Malthouse said officials were trying to recover the data, but could not guarantee that the error did not affect any criminal investigation. He said the government was working “to make sure any operational impact is ignored or mitigated.”