We repeat our reservation, if not yet disquiet, at the suggestion that the fingerprint database now in the control of the Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ) should be made available to the police as part of their crime-fighting arsenal.

The latest proposition has come from Deputy Commissioner of Police Charles Scarlett, who suggested in a speech last week that access to the more than one million fingerprints the EOJ has on file would significantly enhance the constabulary's capacity to fight crime.

On the face of it, Mr. Scarlett and others who have made the suggestion make sense. Last October the constabulary implemented its own electronic fingerprint cross-matching system, which will significantly quicken the pace of search and analysis. Indeed, this has begun to show promising results for the police.

However, as Mr. Scarlett implied, such systems are as good as the databases on which they rest. And what the police now have - which would include old paper-based files that have been scanned and those prints more recently acquired under the new fingerprint law - is not nearly as good as that which is in the possession of the electoral authorities.

Like all Jamaicans, we are concerned over the state of law and order, and have a stake in a substantial improvement by the police of their sub-par performance in crime detection and solution. Nonetheless, there are serious matters to consider ahead of any decision to accede to requests of the type that Mr. Scarlett has revived, such as issues of public trust, matters of privacy and retroactive law-making.

A critical construct of democratic politics is the right to vote in free and fair elections that are also, as they put it, free from fear. This supposes that people also have the right to cast their ballots in secret. Indeed, it was in furtherance of these ideals that the fingerprint identification system was introduced in Jamaica. The process was aimed at reducing (and it has) the prospects for cheating by voter impersonation and ballot box stuffing in Jamaican elections.

Jamaicans in this context were willing to give biodata of themselves on the understanding that such information would be secret, and kept that way, to be used only in circumstances of identifying voters. This pledge was grounded in the law. Indeed, no one expects that their personal bio-information will be bartered or sold to the private sector or other arms of the state without their expressed permission. To have this happen would appear to be a serious invasion of privacy that is not easily or necessarily remedied by retroactive legislation, which itself is always a troublesome move.

Indeed, matters of personal freedom and privacy are particularly sensitive in a liberal democracy and are not to be trifled with, lest you undermine public trust and confidence in the democratic process. It might be that all the people now on the voters' roll would have registered if they were aware that their biometric information would have been shared with the police under the law. By deciding to register they would have given their expressed permission, rather than feeling that they are being sneaked upon.

Whatever decision is finally taken on the suggestions, nothing should be done ahead of a full and frank debate. For while we wish for law and order, we would not want to weaken, or even lose, our democracy.