Why autism training for police isn’t enough

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From beatings and violent arrests to deadly shootings, police use of force against autistic people is not uncommon.

As violent encounters between police and autistic people continue to make headlines, many states and police departments have added training on how to interact with people on the spectrum to their police-education roster. Better training, some say, offers one solution to the ongoing problem of police force being used against autistic people, particularly autistic people of color.

But what constitutes effective training is difficult to establish. There is scant research on how well various kinds of training programs work, and poor trainings can do more harm than good, experts say. Some research suggests that training makes officers more confident that they understand autism, but no less likely to use force.

Compounding the problem is the fact that few police departments track officers’ behavior to see whether autism education makes a difference.

A consensus is emerging that police training on autism should be standardized across departments, involve autistic people and their families, and include regular refresher sessions. But some experts and advocates say the best way to decrease violence may be to minimize interactions between police and autistic people altogether.

Many police departments offer autism training, but the sessions are often optional and vary wildly in length, format and quality.

Cash-strapped police departments tend to lump it in with mental-illness training to save money and time, Copenhaver says.

But even longer trainings can fall short if they exclude autistic people or focus exclusively on nonverbal or intellectually disabled people with the condition. This ‘catastrophic’ view of autism confuses officers, experts and advocates say, and potentially does more harm than good. “Are they learning anything about the strengths of autism? Or is it simply deficits?” says Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, an autistic self-advocate and humanities scholar at the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Rice University in Houston, Texas. “Because if so, then the training could take someone who is mostly a blank slate and feed stigmatizing information into that person.”

Another problem with police training is that many sessions are one-offs, giving officers too little time to absorb information about autism. Without any continuing education, even the best training program won’t make police encounters safer for autistic people, says Lauren Gardner, administrative director of the Autism Program at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. “You cannot just get rid of these knee-jerk assumptions in these one-and-done trainings. People don’t learn things from a one-off session.”

Actual research on the effectiveness of police autism training is rare, and the findings are mixed.

Part of the reason this research is so scarce is that it’s difficult to design. To truly determine a training’s effectiveness, researchers say, studies would have to follow officers after training or collect data on how the officers’ behavior changed — access that police departments are often unwilling to grant. Many police departments don’t even collect that information: Only three of the departments Spectrum surveyed tracked encounters between police and autistic people in a usable way. (Another four said that a disclosed autism diagnosis might be included in incident reports.)

Even when researchers do get access, the sample sizes are often small, and they typically rely on pre- and post-training tests or officer self-reports, which can be impacted by bias, says Kathryn White, assistant professor of pediatric and adolescent medicine at Western Michigan University. Because many training sessions are voluntary, they are not randomly assigned: Officers who sign up for autism trainings tend to have a personal connection to the condition, which can skew the results, researchers say.

In the meantime, advocates and researchers have developed a set of recommendations for police departments. First and foremost, training should be mandatory for all police officers — a step that a handful of states, including Florida, have already taken. It should begin in the academy, with periodic refresher courses for officers on the job. The curriculum should be consistent across police departments, both to save resources and to ensure that autistic people are safe wherever they go. And that curriculum should be tailored to the needs of police officers, with a special focus on de-escalation. Training also works better when it includes local people with autism and their families, according to a 2018 report.

Many advocates argue that training alone will not prevent violent police encounters — especially when underlying racism and ableism go unaddressed.

The takeaway lessons from autism training — be patient, don’t touch people unnecessarily, speak in a low, calm voice — may conflict with other, more foundational training officers receive, particularly in high-stress situations, experts say. “What we’ve been trained to do in high-stress tactical situations is go to that next step to bring greater control,” Zink says. “But authoritative behavior that works for neurotypical people doesn’t work for autistic people.”

And chance encounters between autistic people and the police might be safer if they already knew each other. In some places, autistic people can submit their information to a department’s autism registry, introduce themselves at local precincts or attend community events.

These tactics aren’t always practical and can feel like an invasion of autistic people’s privacy. “You can’t take [your child] to every precinct in every borough,” Proctor says

And non-autistic people need to refrain from calling the police immediately when they see an autistic person behaving in ways they don’t understand — especially when the person is Black, Crane says