Reduce Halton Police Report archives from 27 years to 6 years

Criminalization of Mentally Ill People through Police Records and Screening Practices.

I am writing this letter to complain about the fact that when a person calls 911 seeking mental health assistance and / or the police end up being dispatched, a police record is created that adds insult to injury by stigmatizing that person for life in some places. In outlying areas from the GTA (including Halton, Oakville, Milton, Burlington, Hamilton, Oshawa and smaller communities), these police occurrence records are then kept for 27 years without a process available for having them purged.

These are a serious privacy breach that nobody has protected beleaguered individuals against. It affects a person's ability to obtain volunteering and employment opportunities in the community CAUSING INCREASED MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS, LOSS, STRESS AND HARDSHIP. People in this situation are not able to move on with their life and they feel punished for seeking mental health help. Including someone in the community is the best way to help them (it rehabilitates a person while improving community safety in one fell swoop). Basically there's no mandatory time limitation (that's less than 1 year) for all police forces for the keeping of this information as far as I've been able to find out. As well, there's no purging process available by the affected person even if they've gotten better and have been on medication for a long time.

A person's chances of having a lifelong professional career are over so they will never make something of themselves. Recovered mentally ill or lifelong mentally-ill people need to be given a chance and have guaranteed job security more than NON-mentally-ill or normal people because they are more vulnerable to rejection, disrimination, refusal, job loss and financial instability than normal people. They need stability. They want lifelong professions and careers as Police Officers, Paramedics, Fire Fighters, Solicitor Generals, Prime Ministers, etc. And quite frankly, I don't think there should be any reason to to stop them from achieving their true potential and be included to contributing fully in our society. They can start out as Special Police Constables or Firefighters and over years, win people's trust and work their way right up to the same levels as full-time Police officers who have the inside "scoop" or track in dealing with people with mental health crises, mission person searches or whatever it may be.

You should make a law or statute that puts a 1 or 2 year maximum limit on the holding of this kind of police information across all Ontario municipal police forces. After that "occurrence reports" should be destroyed upon an individuals' request. Selective discrimination, negative bias and profiling are things that mentally ill people should not have to overcome and deal with on top of their medical and financial problems. Please introduce privacy protection for individuals against police scrutiny now..! Human rights are important.

Signed,

A Concerned Ontario Citizen

P.S.: Anyone who even tries to bring up this issue is blacklisted, derogatized or labeled as being a "psycho" or having "psychosis" so nobody does even though 1000's of Ontarians are affected by it every year and the numbers are rising every year (and with regard to the actual reality of the problem legislatively speaking).