Sensitive information of innocent people structurally stored in Dutch police databases

People who were wrongfully accused of a misdemeanor or other criminal offense, are of course free to go. Their mugshots, fingerprints, and personal information however, is structurally stored in databases controlled by the police and public prosecution service. Legally, this information should be deleted.

That’s what Dutch news outlet RTL Nieuws concludes after analyzing the statistics of the public prosecution service between 2020 and 2023.

During this period approximately 20,000 people were wrongfully considered as suspects. If that’s the case, the public prosecution service has to share this information with Justid, an organization of the Department of Justice and Security that provides and stores information about criminal records, identity, criminal investigations, and judicial chains.

Justid must then review the public prosecution service’s request to remove an innocent person’s details. However, this only happened 392 times between 2020 and 2023.

Because no assessments are made, all data of former suspects remains stored in the central database. Nor does a signal go out to the police to remove mugshots or fingerprints.

To make matters worse, back in 2021, the Department of Justice and Security determined that 80,000 people may have been wrongfully listed in police and public prosecution service databases.

The ministry doesn’t know how many innocent people are currently stored in police databases. A spokesperson can confirm that around 6,000 people have already been removed. In a total of 15,000 cases, it was decided that the information had to be retained.

The department is looking into the possibility of automatically notifying the various agencies so it can assess whether mugshots and fingerprints should be removed. This solution should prevent recurrence. The department hopes it will be ready by 2026.

Maša Galič, Assistant Professor of Privacy and Criminal Procedure Law at the Criminal Law and Criminology department of the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam, is appalled by the findings of RTL Nieuws.

“This data should be kept only when strictly necessary. It sends a bad message that the police and judiciary cannot comply with their own laws. Because of these errors, the police unfairly possess far too much data, sometimes of people who have done nothing wrong. This is unacceptable in a democratic society,” she says.

The Dutch data protection authority (DPA) is also shocked and has launched an investigation into the police’s usage of facial recognition.