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“If the person that had called (the police) had just known a little bit about autism,” she said, “by his key social cue, by his speech, the intonation of his speech, they really would have been able to tell and they wouldn’t even have had to call to put the police in that situation.” That’s why community involvement and education are equally as important, O’Malley said. Training is really about safety for everyone, including the community. “If they can take a step back, really analyze the situation a little bit better, it’s much safer for everyone involved.” “It goes from nine seconds from when the police see him to they go hands on,” she said.
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She said she starts training with a video of a call in which a policeman approached a person with autism. She also said the training also stresses the importance of telling the person what the officer wants them to do, and not what they shouldn’t do. O’Malley said the first officers trained on the subject were given a sensory bag with some of those helpful items, but the grant that funded it ran out. She said the training stresses the importance of being able to tell if someone is overwhelmed, sensory-wise, and understand how officers can scale that back, such as through noise-canceling headphones or fidget toys. O’Malley said that training for the academy was molded around the academy’s scenario-based training to show how the scenario might be different if a person with autism spectrum disorder was involved.
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Julie O’Malley, community and education training coordinator for the West Virginia Autism Training Center at Marshall University, said the first training under the law was held June 28, 2021. Autism awareness training within law enforcement started last year. In April 2021, the West Virginia Legislature passed a law that requires the state’s law enforcement and correctional officers to undergo training for handling cases involving someone with autism spectrum disorder in which those people are victims of or witnesses to a crime, or suspected or convicted of a crime.