--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Earlier this month, a police department up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, released a sketch of a suspect. Just another day in police town, except no one knows what this suspect looks like.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The sketch was based purely on DNA. Edmonton police are turning towards an emerging technology with hopes of identifying this suspect in a sexual assault case that has gone cold.
--:-- [Music continues in the background]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The emerging technology is known as DNA phenotyping, using nothing more than DNA found in an investigation to try and figure out what a suspect may have looked like.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And within days of adopting this technology, the Edmonton police had reversed course. They took their DNA police sketch down and apologized to the public. Why?
--:-- Taylor Lambert: It's a case of bad science and poor ethics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With Saks Fifth Avenue, it can be a breeze to shop for your personal style, like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: This is very Sean. This is very Sean-coded. Gucci loafers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Saks says Saks makes shopping feel totally customized to you, whether that's from an in-store stylist or a visit to Saks.com, where they can show you just what you want to see.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: They say they'll even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in or when something you've been eyeing is back in stock.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can find inspiration for your personal style every day at Saks Fifth Avenue.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Support for this show comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown or never wanted in the first place?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving?
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Today Explained, Sean Ramos from A Heads Up, that the show that's ahead of us will feature some discussion of sexual assault, but that's not really what it's about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're here to find out why the whole world seemed to notice a decision made by the Edmonton police in Canada this month.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: It's because the police used something called DNA phenotyping to try and advance a stalled sexual assault investigation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They created a massive backlash that was centered on questions of racism, but also raised a lot of questions about forensic science and the limitations of DNA.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: So in early 2019 a woman was attacked by a stranger on the street and violently sexually assaulted according to police it was quite a brutal attack that left her with life-altering injuries.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was winter in Edmonton and so the man was bundled up and his face was covered.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Essentially, the only identifying details that the police had to go on was he was around five foot four, that he had some kind of an accent when he spoke and that he was black.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The investigation goes nowhere and the police run out of leads.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: From what the detective told us was that they had so little to go on that they were just grasping at straws.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so they turned to phenotyping as basically their last resort Hail Mary longshot.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: It's definitely a last resort.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now for those who aren't in the know, what exactly is phenotyping?
--:-- Taylor Lambert: It's using DNA analysis to produce a computer-generated image of a person.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it's a highly controversial practice.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: DNA contains the building blocks of an individual, but it's not a blueprint.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's not that precise.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: So DNA is pretty good at predicting, say, your probability of hair color or skin color.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But for something like the shape of the human face, there's just way too many complexities involved.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: And you can't make a scientific determination of what a person will look like based on DNA alone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so, in short, scientists say that it can't be done.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: But at least one company claims that it can do this behind closed doors.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's an American company called Parabon, which is really the go-to firm for this when it comes to law enforcement.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Parabon Nanolabs of Reston, Virginia, has developed sophisticated software capable of unlocking information contained in DNA left at a crime scene.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As the program sifts through millions of pieces of genetic information, it slowly begins to build a suspect's appearance.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: So obviously, genetic research is valid science.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's experts in that field who do considerable research to advance our understanding of that scientific approach.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: But where it falls short is making all the countless determinations of probability that you would have to for all of the factors that go into a person's physical appearance in their face.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's not just a simple thing like your hair color will be red or blonde or brown.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: There's so many different complexities involved that scientists say you can accurately predict what someone face will look like.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what Parabon does is they say we are able to do this DNA is a blueprint for a person.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: It defines our hair color, our eye color, our skin color. All of that is written in the DNA.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the trick is just to figure out what parts to look at in order to make those predictions and learn something new about a suspect just based on the DNA.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Snapshot is highly accurate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: and has been successfully evaluated by major metropolitan police departments and federal agencies.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: But the technology that they use, the algorithms that they use, are closed source.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're not peer-reviewed.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Scientists can't look at the data to determine how accurate they are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They can't look at the failure success rate, if you like, because all of that data is also proprietary.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: It sounds at the very least that this is a developing science.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How much does a process like this cost the Edmonton Police Department?
--:-- Taylor Lambert: The police told us that they paid Parabon $1,700 Canadian dollars, which is a little over $1,200 U.S. dollars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Huh, so not that much.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: No.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does that make this common practice for police departments?
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Well, I wouldn't say it's common practice yet, but on Parabon's website, they've posted a selection of some of these so-called DNA mugshots that they've done for various law enforcement agencies around the world, including many in the U.S. and a few prior cases in Canada.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And just based on that catalog, it looks like this is a practice that's been employed by hundreds of law enforcement agencies worldwide.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Some of them do look a pretty good prediction of the person that was eventually caught.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some of them are not even close.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: A lot of them are not even close.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it seems like it's at best educated guesswork.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: I want to go look at these photos.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is it DNA nanotech?
--:-- Taylor Lambert: I'm wondering where to look.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I think it's snapshot.parabon.com.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: I got it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, I'm going to this website.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: I see the Edmonton police's controversial phenotype up here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Obviously, they haven't caught the suspect, so you don't get to see a before and after.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: A composite profile they did for Sylvania, Ohio, where their phenotype DNA snapshot looks kind of like the guy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then I see one in Eugene, Oregon, where the phenotype looks nothing like the guy.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: So it looks just from this brief sample a little hit or miss.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, for sure.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: I'm not an expert in police work, but it seems to me that this would be a less reliable tool than, say, a police sketch drawn from an eyewitness account of somebody.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So perhaps, presumably, they can't solve the case in Edmonton.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: They decide to use this phenotype, and they decide that it'll be a good idea to tweet out the photo, because I guess they have to publicize it in order to get the composite out there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is that what happens?
--:-- Taylor Lambert: That's right. They put out a press release with the photo. They post it on social media. They hold a press conference announcing their use of this technology.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They seem to be fairly proud of it in a way.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: They're sort of trumpeting the fact that they're using this, you know, cutting edge, if you like, technology to solve this terrible crime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How do people respond?
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Not well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The image is immediately excoriated online.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: People point out that this CGI head of a young black man could look like a lot of people in the community and those innocent people might have the cops called on them and become suspects or worse.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean we have data that show that in Canada black people are more likely to have to interact with the police, more likely to be incarcerated, and more likely to die at the hands of the police.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: While there was a lot of outrage about the use of this image, there was also a lot of concern expressed about the very real risks that this image would put on racialized communities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How did the Edmonton police respond?
--:-- Taylor Lambert: They don't exactly apologize.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One guy technically said that he was sorry, kind of, for something, but it's not a real apology.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Canadians know a real apology.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Two days after they had announced the use of this technology, they announced at another press conference that they are removing the image from their website and social media accounts.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: The potential that a visual profile can provide far too broad a characterization from within a racialized community, and in this case, Edmonton's black community, was not something I adequately considered.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But they also insisted that they were just trying to find justice for the victim.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: I prioritized the investigation, which in this case involved the pursuit of justice for the victim, herself a member of the racialized community, over the potential harm to the black community.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're a little defensive of their use of this technology, and they didn't rule out using DNA phenotyping again in the future.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Where does that leave this case, this violent sexual crime from 2019?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, in the two-day span that it was out in the public, you know, the attention that was on it was certainly focused more on the question of whether this image should have been created and released in the first place, more so than on trying to identify a suspect.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: But if the police did get anything out of it from that perspective, they haven't said.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So where this leaves the case is unclear.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: But I think this case has raised a lot of questions that resonated quite widely not just in the city, but across the country and actually even outside of Canada.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Questions about how the police view the black community.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Multiple people in the chain of command would have had to have seen and approved this image before its release.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And another big question it raises is what does it mean that the police are turning to unscientific means in their police work and does the public understand or for that matter do the police understand that forensic dna phenotyping is not considered valid science
--:-- Taylor Lambert: The science of DNA phenotyping when we return on Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can work on your financial goals through Chime today.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At Schwab, how you invest is your choice.
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--:-- Taylor Lambert: Today Explained, we're back, and now we have Professor Dan Crane from Wright State University in Ohio with us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I have testified as an expert witness in cases involving DNA evidence since January of 1991.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Professor Crane knows more about DNA than your average true crime enthusiast.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now over 125 cases, 27 different states, several different countries, Northern Ireland, England, Australia, as well as a number of U.S. federal courts and courts martial.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: So he asked him what he thought when he saw the Edmonton police using DNA phenotyping to try and track down their suspect.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I think it brought to mind a pretty wide variety of thoughts.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: At one level, I'm thinking this is actually a fairly nondescript representation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It seems like it's a pretty broad target that a pretty wide range of people might be said to match.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: And yet, I think I also appreciated that that's consistent with what you should expect from that technology, these approaches at this stage in their development.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The concern then is that because it's got DNA associated with it, that people will give it more weight, more credibility than it probably deserves.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: And, you know, we need to be a little bit cautious about how it is that that sort of information is shared with the general public.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's talk a bit about the backstory of this science.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: When exactly do we get this technology, DNA phenotyping?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When does it make its debut?
--:-- Taylor Lambert: You know, I think you can go back maybe as long as 100 years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, we've learned an awful lot about human genetics through twin studies.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: The studies of identical twins, especially when they've been separated at birth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you and I are like, like sisters.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Sisters, Hallie, we're like twins.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And from that type of work, we've learned that quite a bit about what we are and how we look is determined by our genes.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: For instance, about 80% of our height seems to be governed by what it is that we have in our DNA.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there are also some interesting behavioral things that you can glean from these identical twin studies, meaning that there's things in our DNA.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: That age-old question of boxers versus briefs, it turns out that there's a strong genetic component to that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That if you find a pair of identical twins that were separated at birth and you tell me one of them has a preference for wearing briefs, I'll put money on the fact that His other twin will also be fond of briefs as opposed to boxers.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: They're Hanes. Let's just leave it at that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Almost all of the traits that we might be interested in are what geneticists would call complex traits.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: And that means fairly simply that they determined not by just one gene but determined by often dozens and sometimes hundreds of different genes each of which has some say in what the final result is going to look like in an individual
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the sorts of traits hair color eye color height and then especially things like facial shape or skin color, those are actually things that haven't been studied that much by geneticists.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Most of the federal research dollars is dedicated to resolving things associated with life-threatening diseases.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so for DNA phenotyping, it's that sort of stuff that fell off the back of the truck that people are trying to piece together to get something useful for for this other purpose.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Well, because it isn't as vastly studied a field, I wonder how reliable this science is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, as somebody who gets involved in court cases where DNA evidence is involved, to my knowledge, the types of tests that are done for DNA phenotyping haven't even started to appear in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: So it's very difficult to argue that these types of findings would be accepted as evidence in a court of law.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that hasn't stopped police departments, at least the Edmonton Police Department, from trying to use it.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Is this a first? Is this an anomaly? Or is this increasingly a method that police departments turn to?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, for maybe on the order of 20 years now, going back to maybe around 2004, I'm aware of a case that a United States crime laboratory used DNA phenotyping to assist in an investigation.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Today, one of the major players in the investigation into serial killer Derek Todd Lee talked about the case that gripped the Baton Rouge area.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She shared the major turning point in the case, a DNA sample that completely refocused the search for the killer.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Pretty much up till this point in time, it's been used as a method of last resort.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When it's a crime that's of particular interest to local law enforcement and they've exhausted everything else to generate leads, they might then turn to seeing what they could get from this type of DNA phenotyping approach.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: There have been in the past couple of years, a few laboratories that are starting to embrace it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Edmonton obviously is one, but Australia, their law enforcement has done some kicking of the tires of a number of different approaches to doing DNA phenotyping, and they've settled on one that they now would like to use as part of their routine casework.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: But on the other side of the coin, there are countries that have very explicitly and specifically said, you should not do this type of testing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Belgium and Germany, for instance, have laws that very specifically prohibit it.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: We're still in the early stages of how society wants to deal with this type of evidence.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Were you surprised when the Edmonton police backpedaled and deleted this post and said they were sorry for sharing this composite image?
--:-- Taylor Lambert: I'm trying to think what the best way to express this is because I'm starting to feel like an old guy, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because I've seen this play out before.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: It seems very common, and maybe particularly in the area of forensic science, for there to be very enthusiastic proponents of a new methodology.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they're typically the developers of the new methodology.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: And they get out in front, and they do a good sales job, and they persuade others to get on their bandwagon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then the questions start to get asked and it's kind of like a pendulum swing.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: We have very enthusiastic proponents that develop these approaches.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everything looks like sunshine and roses, and then you start to hear some of the serious questions.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: And then you go back to the other way and you become overcautious in terms of not utilizing the information that you might be able to get from these new approaches.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you think it's only a matter of time before DNA phenotyping technology improves and police departments around the world are using this as a more normalized way of investigating crimes they can't solve?
--:-- Taylor Lambert: I do think it's a matter of time before the work is done that would allow us to use it more reliably.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How long that time frame is is a reasonable question.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: I don't think we're anywhere near there just yet, but maybe in five or 10 years, we could start talking seriously about something that would pass muster in American courts at the very least.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And until then, what should police departments in America and I don't know, say Edmonton, Alberta, Canada be keeping in mind?
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Well, until then, I think they should sit patiently and wait.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Until it's ready for prime time.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Dan Crane is a biology professor at Wright State University in Fairbourn, Ohio.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Earlier in the show, you heard from Taylor Lambert with the CBC over in Edmonton.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Our program today was produced by Siona Petros.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was edited and fact-checked by Matthew Collette and mixed and mastered by Paul Robert Mounsey.
--:-- Taylor Lambert: Thanks for listening to Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
