Abstract
A significant number of individuals are being diagnosed with autism in the United States. Autism characteristics have direct implications for how law enforcement officers conduct investigations, make arrests, and respond to the physical and mental needs of autistic individuals. Despite these implications, little is known about what kinds of interactions law enforcement has with autistic individuals and the characteristics of such interactions. The present research is a mixed-methods approach to analyzing media reports involving law enforcement and autistic individuals/autism to uncover what interactions law enforcement has with autistic persons and the characteristics of such interactions. Findings have direct implications for law enforcement media relations and policy.
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Notes
The source of the study he mentioned was not cited and hence, is unknown.
Quotation marks were not placed around the search terms. As such, the internet search engine pulled stories containing both phrases, not just stories including the exact phrase.
Same as the footnote above.
Note that autistic persons being injured and killed by police are mutually exclusive categories. For example, if a person was choked by a police officer, experienced bruising on the neck and later died, the person was not counted as experiencing both and injury and being killed. They were only counted as being killed.
As with police interactions, a victimized individual was never considered as both injured and killed.
The researchers looked for the most recent version of a news story in attempting to determine whether law enforcement were still looking for or had located the missing individual.
No missing/wandering individual was counted as both experiencing an injury and dead.
This does not include crimes committed against autistic persons by on-duty police officers. This information was not accounted for in this study.
It was impossible to identify which individuals were not on medication.
This number is higher than the total number of persons actually victimized because in some cases it was not clearly established that a person had in fact been victimized (in 6 cases there was missing or conflicting information). However, these cases were counted in terms of injuries and deaths because an autistic person was in fact injured or killed.
Few incidents involved agencies which had autism training in place at the time of the incident.
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Copenhaver, A., Tewksbury, R. Interactions Between Autistic Individuals and Law Enforcement: a Mixed-Methods Exploratory Study. Am J Crim Just 44, 309–333 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-018-9452-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-018-9452-8