The DNA collection program around Dallas was just one part of a larger Prostitute Diversion Initiative to get sex workers off the streets and into treatments. Initially, the Dallas Police Department would just arrest sex workers at truck stops. It didn’t work. There were hundreds of sex workers at these truck stops, and they would go right back after their 48 hours in jail.

“We were really frustrated by this,” said Louis Felini, then a Dallas PD sergeant who initiated the program. Felini managed to convince his skeptical superior to try something new. And in 2007, the Dallas Police Department and Dallas County Sheriff’s Office began camping out at a truck stop from 6 pm to 3 am with counselors, social workers, and nurses. The officers round up sex workers, who can either go to jail or talk to counselors and into treatment programs for drug abuse and job training. Many choose the latter.

Dallas’s initiative has gotten some attention in national media, but the DNA collection aspect less so. (The only other similar DNA collection program anyone else had heard of was in Edmonton, Canada.) Submitting a DNA sample was not a prerequisite for getting counseling or treatment, but Felini is ruthlessly blunt about its goal. When I asked him how he pitched the program to sex workers, he answered with a well-practiced line: “What do you want on your toe tag?...Do you want Jane Doe in a potter’s grave or do you actually want your name on there?” In 2013, the DNA database helped identify a sex worker who died in an ER in Fort Worth.

The sex workers themselves were of course well aware of the dangers in their work. In the focus groups that Katsanis ended up conducting in Dallas, they told stories of rapes, beatings, and murders. “One of the girls ... they found her mutilated and chopped up, and in a trash can in a whole other city,” said a woman given the pseudonym of Eva in the focus groups.

Katsanis ended up doing two focus groups, one of women currently in treatment at the Nexus Recovery Center after being picked up by police at a truck stop, and another of women who had recently completed treatment but came to weekly check-ins at a Positive Recovery Intensive Divert Experience (PRIDE) court. To her surprise, even though these women distrusted the police, they were on the balance willing to provide their DNA. Eva, for example, also said:

My guy, the few times that I did talk to him while I was on the street, he always used to joke about the fact that they were going to tattoo my social security number and my address on my foot so that if I died that somebody knew who I belonged to. That was one of the reasons why I did it.

What was striking in these interviews is that DNA, became an anchor of identity these women, who use fake names and often lack IDs. For example, “Florence” explained:

Because sometimes [pimps] will take [women]. They’ll strip them of their drivers’ license, their social security card, their name - make them use another name. And if they have them all drugged up... But at some point, if you have me hopped up on enough drugs, and I’m up for enough days and have, you know, a little amount of food and no sleep, I mean, after a long period of time, I’m sure that anyone could forget who they are.

But the women did worry that their DNA, once stored, could be planted on crime scenes. Florence also said:

I've heard of cases where people have been… their DNA was found somewhere where they had never been. So that would be a concern to me is who has access to it because you never know how crazy a person can be to take your DNA, put it somewhere, and implicate you in a crime just by doing so.”

And “Pearl” worried that her DNA could be mistakenly matched, “Nothing’s perfect,” she said in the focus group, “It could place you in a crime scene you weren’t even in… I won’t be giving mine up. Personally.” And forensics and legal experts have raised questions about the black box algorithms sometimes used to determine DNA matches.