Training Law Enforcement Officers How To Respond to People With Autism-Does it Work, Part 1?

I have participated in training law en-forcement (LE) and other first responders in what do when encountering people with autism. On Facebook I commented about it, and someone replied that it does not work and there is very little evidence for it. I asked what does the poster suggest. The poster replied that there should be mental health crisis response teams. What are the facts? Does the training of LE effect the treatment of autistic people? There is plenty of research demonstrating the lack of education of LE in handling encounters with autistic individuals (Gardner & Campbell, 2025; Sereno-Ferraro & Schuler, 2026; Hinkle & Lerman, 2023). It is true that there is not much research discussing the success of training of LE in interacting with autistics, but there is not evidence of the alternative of mental health crisis response teams. What needs to be done is research verifying whether training LE or crisis response teams will work.

References

Gardner, L & Campbell, J.M. (2025). Training law enforcement officers about    autism: evaluation of adding virtual        reality or stimulation to a traditional    training approach, 55(8), pp. 2643-       2650. Journal of Autism and             

Developmental Disorders

Hinkle, K.A. & Lerman, D.C. (2023). Pre-

paring law enforcement to engage

successfully with individuals with autism spectrum disorder: an evaluation of a performance-based approach, 53(3), 887-900. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disabilities

Sereno-Ferraro, A & Schuler, R. A.        (2026). Evaluating community-inormed training module for autism recontion in policing, 33(2) 409-429. Psychology, psychiatry, and Law.