Since 2005, every person has been required to provide cell material after being convicted of an offence punishable by a prison sentence of four years or more, even if the sentence ultimately imposed is lower.
In the early years, only suspects and traces could be included for crimes that carried a prison sentence of eight years or more. Since 2005, the database has grown by leaps and bounds. Van der Geest: “Then we were able to link more and more traces to people and it really became big.”
The Schoof cabinet also wants to use commercial databases for forensic research. In this video we explain how that works: