by Chris Richard/California
Health Report
CHRIS RICHARD/CALIFORNIA HEALTH
REPORT
The quiz was really easy.
Who was the first president of
the United States? What’s 39 plus 16? What does UFO stand for?
But test-taking conditions were
less than ideal.
A group of sheriff’s deputies
would have to read the 10 questions through 3D glasses as a loudspeaker blared
disjointed music, speech and static. Right-handed people would be required to
write their answers legibly with their left, and vice versa.
At the end of the 60 seconds
allotted for the quiz, most people hadn’t finished. Some said they felt
frustrated because they knew the answers and couldn’t write them down.
That was just a hint of what it’s
like to be autistic, said Kate Movius of Autism Interaction Solutions, who
included the quiz in a recent training session at a Los Angeles County
Sheriff’s substation.
"Imagine you felt like that
all the time. Imagine if somebody asked you, 'Where do you live?' and you know
exactly where you live, and you can’t get the words out," she told the
deputies.
"It’s very easy with those
with autism to misunderstand them and think they’re either being stubborn,
belligerent, rude or noncompliant," said Movius. "These are the four
adjectives that often get applied."
Amid increased public scrutiny of
law enforcement tactics, some Southern California agencies - including the
LAPD, the Orange Police Department, the Los Angeles School Police Department
and others - have started specialized training to help officers read the signs
of autism and respond appropriately.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s
City of Industry substation began offering such training in January at the
request of City Councilwoman Cory Moss, whose eight-year-old son has autism.
"The deputies have been
telling us they’re really learning," Moss said. "A lot of times,
they’ll say, ‘I didn’t know what I didn’t know."
Knowing what to look for can be
especially challenging because autism is a spectrum disorder. Autistic people
share some degree of difficulty in social interaction, verbal and nonverbal
communication. But while some people with autism have intellectual disability, others
excel in visual skills, music, math and art, according to the advocacy group
Autism Speaks.
Movius said law enforcement
authorities can expect the number of interactions with the autistic to
increase. Citing statistics from Autism Speaks, she said the autism rate is
increasing, and noted that people with developmental disabilities are seven
times more likely to have dealings with law enforcement than those without
disabilities.
Some of those interactions have
generated controversy. In July, for instance, a Burbank police officer used
pepper spray and a Taser to subdue a 16-year-old autistic boy who allegedly was
assaulting him after the officer stopped his mother’s car because the teen was
not wearing a seatbelt, according to a police spokesperson.
In her training presentation,
Movius described a series of scenarios where people might look like they were
up to no good when in fact they were simply autistic.
For example, police might get a
call about somebody walking down the street looking into car windows. While it
might be a car burglar looking for things to steal, it might be an autistic
person fascinated by something he’d glimpsed through a window, Movius said.
Autistic people often are literal
minded, so they might answer affirmatively to a deputy’s question, "Are
you on drugs?" because they’d taken aspirin recently, she said.
And sometimes, what looks like
recalcitrance is simply an inability to speak. Movius suggested alternatives
like handing a seemingly uncommunicative person a smart phone or tablet to type
out answers.
An especially disconcerting event
can be a "meltdown," a little-understood event in which an autistic
person seems to fly into a tantrum for no reason, sometimes striking or biting
himself. Movius said about two years ago in Glendale, police got a call about a
kidnapping attempt – people had seen two men struggling to wrap a third man in
a blanket. It turned out the two men were the third man’s caregivers, she said,
noting that it’s sometimes necessary to gently try to restrain someone having a
meltdown.
In such cases, the best thing a
law enforcement officer can do is "empower the parent or the
caregiver," said Bobbie Hendrickson, who attended the training session
with her two autistic children.
"The parent or the caregiver
knows what the person needs," she said. "For me, it would be just
keeping people away from us and telling them, 'Everybody go about your business
and let them through. It’s OK.'"
Deputy Christopher Abeyta said
one of the principles he learned was the importance of giving himself time to
interpret what he observes. It might take time to consider the possibility that
somebody could be autistic.
"I think I would just slow
things down," he said.
That’s the kind of lesson
Sheriff’s Lt. John Gannon, who oversees the training program, wants to convey.
"People who come through
this have that extra layer of knowledge in their minds," he said. In a challenging situation, "Now maybe
they’ll think, 'It could be ...' and they try something different."
Deputies have already used that
new perspective to ease communication with several autistic people, Gannon
said.
Interactions between people with
autism and the police can result in miscommunication that leads to quick
escalation.
Last September, police in Kodiak,
Alaska responding to a report of a man breaking into a car restrained a
28-year-old autistic man who had been checking his family’s mailbox nearby. The
man didn’t turn face down on the ground to be handcuffed as ordered. Officers
pepper-sprayed him as he screamed, "I’m sorry! I want to go home!" A
police investigation found that the use of force was appropriate, but the man’s
family has sued.
In July, police in North Miami,
Florida shot and wounded the caregiver of a severely autistic man who had
wandered away from a group home and was playing with a silver toy truck.
Someone reported the truck as a gun.
The shooting of caretaker Charles
Kinsey provoked widespread outrage after the online release of a bystander’s
video emerged showing him with his arms raised as officers confronted the
unidentified autistic man, who was shouting loudly. The president of North
Miami’s police union was quoted as saying the officer thought Kinsey was in
danger and was aiming for the autistic man and hit the caretaker by mistake.
During the July stop in the
Burbank incident, the teen began to argue with his mother and the officer, at
one point saying he wanted to fight the officer "hand-to-hand," said
Burbank Police Sgt. Claudio Losacco. He said the officer, a four-year veteran,
tried to reduce tensions by issuing a warning instead of a traffic citation,
but the youth remained agitated and aggressive.
Losacco said the boy kicked his
car door open into the officer’s knees, peeled off his sweatshirt and
approached the officer in a fighting stance, telling the officer to pepper
spray him. The officer did, but without apparent effect, Losacco said. He said
the teen punched the officer several times, knocking off his glasses, whereupon
the officer shocked him with his Taser and handcuffed him. The boy has been
arrested on suspicion of issuing a challenge to fight in a public place,
resisting an officer by force and battery on a peace officer, Losacco said.
"That is the narrative that
the police department is presenting, but the family disputes those facts and is
prepared to challenge them," said Areva Martin, an attorney representing
the boy’s family. She said she’s requested a copy of the officer’s body-camera
video of the confrontation, and the family is weighing a lawsuit.
"What we see in so many of
these cases is a resistance to patience, a resistance to how individuals with
mental health issues respond," Martin said.
"Police are trained to give
you an order, and their expectation is that you will follow that order
immediately," she said. "And if you do not, they then ratchet it up.
And they oftentimes go from zero to 100 very quickly."
"The reality is, said
Martin, "if you give an order to a person with autism, they don’t have the
cognitive ability to process that order and to respond to it in the way that
police are trained someone should respond."
Losacco said that accusation
doesn’t fit his department. He noted that Burbank officers undertook training
on dealing with people with autism last year, and were featured on the trainer’s
website.
Emily Iland, who led two days of
training for Burbank in June 2015, said it was her understanding it included
all of the police department’s sworn officers.
"But even when you’re
trained and trained well," says Iland, "sometimes a situation takes a
course of its own."
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