THE move by Home Secretary Jack Straw to lift the ban on police keeping DNA samples taken from innocent people and to allow them to electronically fingerprint suspects in the street will, of course, be seen by high-minded liberals as another assault on the rights of the individual.

But, surely, if there is any great erosion of liberty in this country it is that which comes in the form of the crimes which - often brutally - deprive thousands of people daily of the right to the safety of their persons and their property.

And the tough-on-crime Mr Straw is right to seize every legitimate weapon he can defend those rights.

Indeed, with these steps, he is arming the police with both new technology and common sense.

In the case of DNA samples, it amounts to putting an end to the futile and wasteful practice of them having at present to destroy those taken in mass screenings - at a cost of some £40 each - when the individuals from whom they were taken are ruled out of an investigation.

Now, as long as the donors consent, they will be kept, providing our crime-fighters with a valuable database against which samples taken from suspects in the future can be compared in bids to trace offenders.

Similarly, the new technique of taking people's fingerprints with hand-held scanners linked to a database capable of comparing more than a million prints a second will enable police on the street to make an instant identification of suspects they have arrested.

But if there is a sinister aspect to this which suggests that the state and science are increasingly combining to destroy the privacy and freedom of the individual, is not this specious notion easily swept away by the fact that the innocent and the law-abiding that these measures are designed to protect have no need to fear them - and lots of reasons to welcome them if crimes become fewer as a result?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.