From the Corvallis Gazette-Times, June 26 2009
The Oregon House has passed a bill intended to help police officers deal with people whose conduct may be caused by mental or medical problems.
Rep. Andy Olson, R-Albany, had pushed for the bill since 2007 and is one of its principal sponsors. The bill now goes to the Senate, where it’s uncertain if action can occur before the legislative session ends.
House Bill 3466 would create a voluntary statewide database of people with mental health and medical issues. It would give officers information helpful when they’re responding to some calls.
For example, Olson said Wednesday, police might respond to a call that a man had eaten a restaurant meal but had no money to pay. Technically, he could be arrested for theft. But if the officer learns he’s on a database for mental illness or dementia, police could just call relatives to come pick him up and take care of the bill.
Capt. Eric Carter of the Albany police said knowing of a person’s mental-health issues is useful to officers responding to a call. “It does change the way law enforcement officers deal with them,” he said.
With known chronic cases, he said, the Albany police have had some success by calling in mental health workers rather than taking people to jail.
In a statement, Olson recalled that three years ago Marion County Sheriff Raul Ramirez told the Interim Judiciary Committee that county jails were the largest facility in the state for holding people suffering from mental health issues.
“HB 3466 addresses this problem by giving law enforcement the ability to help individuals without automatically incarcerating them,” Olson said,
The database would be maintained by the Oregon State Police as part of the Law Enforcement Data System.
EXTRA – all about HB 3466 from the fantastic bill-tracking database from The Oregonian.
OUR COMMENT – This bill is a violation of the fourth, fifth, ninth and fourteenth amendment of the US constitution.
I thought HIPPA would prevent a “list” for “special” people. This smacks too close to NAZISM to me. Tell me are they going to line us up like we’re useless people and shoot us just because they’ve “tagged” us as mentally ill? Since moving back to this state, I’ve seen at least 5 incidents in the past 7 years that police could have handled differently instead of blasting the mentally ill person to death. This just makes it easier AND more excusable for shooting all mentally ill people.
This is really scary!
I understand that Mr. Olson really just wants to help but hasn’t considered the ramifications of putting someone on a “nut list.”
I think the thing to do would be to write Mr. Olson with well-reasoned, literate arguments as to why keeping a list of people deemed “mentally ill” would be a bad thing to do (not to mention unconstitutional). I’ve put that on my “to do” list for this weekend.
And yes, it does sound like a Nazi tactic — anyone know what color star the mentally ill were forced to sew on their clothing in Nazi Germany? No, wait, people too disabled to sew stars on their clothes were just gassed…
Hi Lynne,
This sounds like a direct conduit to the Oregon Supreme Court.
It’s also a violation of the Eighth Amendment. According to 18 U.S.C. §§2340-2340A (2001), any experiment should be conducted so as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury. Coerced interrogation techniques being applied can have no direct clinical relevance to the application of the charges against this Defendant and medical monitoring is being proscribed as cruel treatment; as torture, humiliating and degrading treatment being effectively employed as one criminal act to protect against liability for another, as illegal and non-consensual human experimentation can constitute a war crime (see 18 U.S.C. §2441 (2006)) and a crime against humanity. Further, those who authorized, designed, designed, implemented, and supervised this regime of human experimentation-whether health professionals, uniformed personnel, or civilian
national security officials-must be held to account if further in-depth investigation confirms that they have violated ethical and legal strictures on professional behavior in ways that previously have been found to constitute war crimes against humanity by international tribunals.
How about this conduit: http://judiciary.zoomshare.com/files/OREGON_SUPREME_COURT.pdf