&gt; But I&#x27;m not sure that&#x27;s the correct metric; I think you really care about the amortized cost of a mistaken match across all N crimes. So you don&#x27;t see the &quot;paradoxical&quot; quadratic increase.<p>It seems to me what we should really care about is the number of people falsely convicted, which is false-positive-rate-per-defendant * number-of-defendants. Since the size of the database (and therefore the false positive rate) is related to the number of defendants, the number of falsely convicted people increases quadratically with the number of people subjected to DNA testing.