Here is a lede from the New York Legal Aid Society about the slowly trending use of racially skewed DNA bases being LEO searched for relatives of suspects. (More news below).

The limitations of familial DNA also made headlines in 2014 after Idaho police used familial searching on a private DNA database owned by Ancestry.com in an attempt to solve a 1996 murder case: the results falsely implicated an innocent man in New Orleans whose father had volunteered his DNA to a private, church-sponsored research database decades prior that was later bought by Ancestry.com.

More NYLegal Aid forensic info:

NIST 2016: Video Archive & Downloadable Presentations “On November 8th and 9th, 2016, experts gathered for the fourth biennial Forensics @ NIST conference, where scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) presented their latest research on ballistic toolmarks, fingerprints, digital forensics, trace evidence, DNA profiling, and more. In addition, experts from the NIST-funded Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence discussed their efforts to bring new probabilistic methods to bear on forensic evidence.” Click the picture to view the video archive and download presentations from the 2016 NIST Conference

“The Science of Discerning the Real from the Fake: The innate susceptibility of digital content, such as footage captured from a surveillance camera, to alterations strengthens the need to devise specialized investigative procedures that are capable of establishing the trustworthiness of digital images and videos.” (Forensic Magazine)“Forensic Evidence Largely Not Supported by Sound Science—Now What?” (Lab Manager) Forensic Magazine interviews Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick, a scientist who is “widely regarded as the founder of the field of forensic genealogy” about the history and use of forensic genealogy “More Prosecutors Refuse To Accept Guilty Pleas Based On Faulty $2 Field Drug Tests” (TechDirt)