FINGER-PRINTING THE POLICE

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Are people being arrested just so that the police can put their genetic fingerprints on the national database? A shocking thing, if true. The aspect of the story Tuesday's Newsnight concentrated on was the claim that 75% of young black men may now be on the DNA register. Remarkable, if true. Obviously working on the assumption that it is true, "Richard Watson has been trying to find out how they (i.e. black people) feel about it," said Jeremy Paxman in his introduction.
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Richard Watson began by posing this question about the 75% figure: "Could it be explained by the fact that black young men are disproportionately guilty of crime or is it evidence that the police are disproportionately targeting this ethnic minority?"

It can't be said that much attention was paid to the first possibility.
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Who were Watson's 'talking heads'? Were they, as is usual in a BBC report, Left-heavy? I'll let you judge (with a little colour-coordinated prompting, of course!)
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First up was James Easy, "a (black) university graduate with a first class degree in politics", who believes he's still on the database following a caution for "a minor playground fight when he was just eleven"; Brian Paddick, Lib Dem former deputy assistant of the Met (and, along with Sir Ian Blair, the Beeb's favourite liberal ex-copper); Charles Crichlow, president of the left-dominated Black Police Federation; various people (including the editor) from Live magazine (a community magazine mentored by journalists from The Guardian and The Observer) and Gavin Phillipson, professor of law at Durham University.
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I suppose balance for all this was provided by Jeremy Paxman's interview with Chris Grayling . This was a high-scorer on the interruption coefficient chart, achieving an I.C. of 2.1.