British police minister says “human error” has led to the removal of hundreds of thousands of DNA records and other criminal suspect data from the national police computer
LONDON – Britain’s police minister said on Monday that “human error” had led to the deletion of hundreds of thousands of DNA records and other data on criminal suspects from the national police computer.
Kit Malthouse told lawmakers in the House of Commons that the disaster occurred during a “regular housekeeping” on the computer, which holds 13 million records. He said about 400,000 cases had been deleted, including 213,000 criminal cases and 170,000 arrest files.
“Clearly this situation is very serious,” Malthouse said, adding that “we will know the full extent of the impact of this problem in the next few days.”
Labor lawmaker Yvette Cooper said it was “very difficult to understand how 400,000 records could be deleted from such a crucial system without an adequate backup system”.
Malthouse said officials are trying to recover the data, but cannot guarantee that no criminal investigation will be affected by error. He said the government was working “to ensure that any operational impact is removed or mitigated”.