Perspectives from the ASD community on police interactions: Challenges & recommendations
Section snippets
What this paper adds?
When developing training for first responders, it is important to consider the input of multiple stakeholders, including people with Autism. This paper contributes to a growing body of research on the forensic implications of Autism, through adding the perspective of Autistic people. Though research suggests that people with ASD are likely to have a substantial number of police interactions in their lifetime, there is scarce published research on how the police should approach these
Method & participants
As described in our earlier paper (Salerno & Schuller, 2019), this research employed a collaborative and community-engaged research strategy. An online questionnaire was developed in consultation with members of the ASD community as well as subject-matter experts. The questionnaire that will be discussed in this paper contained two major sections: (1) challenges of interacting with Autistic people, including potentially problematic behaviours (2) recommendations as to what police need to know
Data analysis
Our previous paper (Salerno & Schuller, 2019) provided a descriptive, qualitative analysis of the nature of interactions between the police and people with ASD living in Canada, as well as their perceptions of their police interactions. As described in the previous paper, just over 80% of respondents (n = 29) reported that they had at least one interaction with the police in their lifetime, and more than half (53%) reported 4 or more police interactions. These police encounters occurred under a
Conclusions and recommendations
The purpose of this study was to integrate the views, lived experiences, and recommendations of the Autistic community relating to police interactions with Autistic people. In summary, recommendations reflected a need for police officers to make adjustments when interacting with Autistic people, both to their behaviour as well as the environment. Respondents offered several tangible recommendations as to how interactions with Autistic people could be better managed. As a whole, respondents
Declarations of Competing Interest
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge the respondents, as well as everyone in the ASD community who generously gave their time to complete our survey, and/or supported and shared this research opportunity with their family, friends and community members.
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