And I wasn't even ­arrested. One Sunday morning, there was something that looked very like a spud gun lying on our back lawn – plastic but fashioned to minutely resemble James Bond's favoured Walther PPK. In spite of my wife's protests, I picked it up. She was right: far too heavy to be a toy. Once the firearms squad had swept the garden, they got out the DNA swabs to eliminate my clumsy hands from their subsequent examination of the gun.

But, Jacqui, I'd like you to keep my DNA. For as long as you want. I simply can't see why not. I'll fight as hard as the next man against the loss of genuine civil liberties. I don't think I should be held without charge for more than a couple of weeks. I don't want to have to carry an ID card when I go out for a pint of milk. But I truly do not understand how my DNA profile sitting in a database limits my rights or freedoms.

As long as I remain law-abiding, it is valueless. Not a single conviction has been overturned as a result of misleading DNA evidence. Indeed the forensic tide is now running in the opposite direction: as the Guardian reported ­yesterday in launching its Justice on Trial series, the Criminal Cases Review Commission wants to make vastly wider use of DNA to examine possible ­mis­carriages of justice – all resulting from more questionable forms of ­evidence. And if in the future a fault is discovered in the reliability of DNA, it would not invalidate a DNA database but merely make more stringent demands on any jury assessing it.

When I was a magistrate, I found myself sitting on a pre-trial hearing of two young men who had suddenly been arrested for a rape committed three years previously. It was the early days of DNA and, out of nowhere, it had brought them into the frame. It was a genuinely shocking experience. The ­victim had been unable to identify the assailants but now there was hope of closure for her. It was a very powerful moment.

And there have been many others since. Just Google "rapist DNA" and you'll bring up the cases of any number of multiple rapists newly identified by a chance DNA test, either of them or of a close relative.

But good cases don't necessarily make good laws. Instead, let's imagine how it would be if there were a universal DNA database. If a potential rapist knew that his DNA was on file, he would know arrest was a near-certainty. A genuinely powerful deterrent and, even if not, this would still remove many violent attackers from the streets long before they committed their second or third crime. As with vaccinations, we might in the end develop herd immunity against rape and many other violent crimes. And we do not class vaccination as an intrusion.

So, home secretary, please start with my DNA profile and keep going until you've got everyone. Because I passionately believe that there's a Gordian knot of nonsense-thinking that we need to cut through: this is simply not about innocence or guilt. The argument has become dangerously skewed: that "only the guilty deserve to be swabbed, that the innocent should not suffer this apparent indignity". It's only on this basis that the European court of human rights has recently found against the Home Office.

But what indignity? Why should this be an issue that divides the guilty and the innocent? There are many pieces of information that we surrender in order to make ourselves safer: for instance, I cannot get a passport without assembling many personal details far more intimate than my DNA profile. From the age of 16, I allowed the state to tag me with a number that will then track all my working hours until the day I die. A visit to any social security office will demand information vastly more intrusive than my DNA. The information demanded by these agencies changes all the time, so why not now include a DNA profile among the information a government has a justifiable need to collect? Simply because the police were the first to ­collect this information, it has been filed under "Fit Only for Criminal Types". It has been wrongly filed.

After all, what can the state do with it? The other information it holds on me seems far more "corruptible". If you really want "police state" information on me, simply get hold of my Visa, ­Nectar and Blockbuster cards. Assuming you're planning to launch your fascist super-state, you will garner far more useful behavioural details from my mobile phone bill than from my DNA profile. Furthermore, a universal database would put an end to any anxieties about discrimination against certain over-represented groups in the current hit-and-miss system.

"No More State Intrusion" has become a rallying cry of both left and right, the left tending towards an anarchic utopia of individualistic anonymity, the right determined to reduce the size of government at any price. But in this instance, there is no slippery slope, no widening wedge. This is bog-standard, harmless information with a potentially immense and exciting power to do good. There are real battles out there to be fought, and this is not one of them.