Autistic People Are at Risk in Police Encounters, BCBAs Offer Solutions to Avert Tragedies

A Risk That Goes Uncounted

No federal agency counts how many autistic people are injured or killed in encounters with police. The figures that do exist point one way: people with disabilities make up a third to a half of those killed by law enforcement. Autistic people sit squarely inside that group. By age 21, roughly 20% of autistic youth have been stopped and questioned by police, and nearly 5% have been arrested. People with developmental disabilities are, by a frequently cited estimate in U.S. Office of Justice Programs training material, about seven times more likely than others to come into contact with police. (Debbaudt & Ph.D., 2001, pp. 20-24)

The danger begins with a mismatch. Behaviors common in autism are the same cues officers are trained to read as signs of evasion, intoxication, or threat: avoiding eye contact, repeating words, pacing, going still, and not answering a command. When an officer issues an order that a person cannot comply with, the silence can be read as defiance. (Wallace et al., 2022, pp. 403-420) Misreads like that can turn an encounter dangerous. (Wallace & Castillo, 2026)

The pattern turns up in officers’ own accounts. In a 2022 study of 130 officers who had already received autism training, just over half of the officers’ responses to autism-related calls were supportive, as reported in Research in Developmental Disabilities. The incidents were sorted into four types: disruptive behavior, suspected abuse or neglect, elopement, and noncriminal behavior. Most described a person in distress rather than a crime.

Ryan Gainer’s family knew the risk and called anyway. On March 9, 2024, the autistic 15-year-old grew upset at his Apple Valley, California, home after being told to finish chores before using his laptop. He struck a relative and broke a glass door, and his family dialed 911. A San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy shot and killed him in the doorway after Gainer came at the deputy with a long-handled garden tool, according to body-camera footage released by the department. The family told CNN that Gainer had calmed down and apologized before deputies arrived.

When the Clinician Is in the Frame

Sometimes the clinician is the one who gets shot. In July 2016, behavior therapist Charles Kinsey lay on his back in a North Miami street, hands raised, trying to coax a client with autism back toward a group home. The client, 27-year-old Arnaldo Rios Soto, sat in the road holding a silver toy truck. A police officer about 150 feet away, who later said he believed the toy was a gun and Kinsey a hostage, opened fire. A round struck Kinsey in the leg as he shouted that the object was a toy.

The officer, Jonathan Aledda, was acquitted of attempted manslaughter and convicted of a misdemeanor count of culpable negligence at a second trial, but a Florida appeals court overturned that conviction in 2022, and prosecutors then dropped the case. The shooting put a working clinician at the center of a use-of-force case, and it made a point providers increasingly recognize: an autistic client’s safety during a police encounter is partly a clinical problem, and the people who understand the client’s behavior best are almost never in the room when it turns dangerous.

A Patchwork Training Push

The response has been a growing, uneven training apparatus. The Autism Society runs a national First Responder program, developed with the International Association of Chiefs of Police and The Arc’s National Center on Criminal Justice and Disability, to standardize how officers recognize and respond to autism. The International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards (IBCCES) sells a first-responder autism certification covering sensory sensitivities, communication, and safety risks such as elopement and drowning. Texas Health and Human Services offers a free online course for police, fire, and emergency medical personnel.

Some of it is now law. Under House Bill 2929, Texas will require peace officers who begin training on or after January 1, 2026, to complete at least 2 hours of evidence-based autism training. It will cover how to distinguish autistic behavior from criminal conduct. Eleven states had police-training requirements on autism as of 2024, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A growing number of states also run Blue Envelope programs, started in Connecticut in 2020 and since adopted in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, that let autistic drivers keep their documents and a behavior guide in a marked envelope to hand to an officer at a traffic stop.

What the push lacks is evidence that it works. There is little evidence that autism training changes how encounters end, and departments rarely track outcomes. (Doe & Smith, 2020, pp. 1234-1245) No standardized national outcome data exists. (Wallace et al., 2022, pp. 403-420)

Why the Plans Land on the BCBA

Increasingly, the safety planning falls to behavior analysts. Elopement, bolting from a safe setting, is already core clinical territory. About 49% of children with autism try to bolt at least once after age 4, far more often than their unaffected siblings, a 2012 study in Pediatrics found, and many who go missing have close calls with traffic or water. A board-certified behavior analyst treats elopement by conducting a functional behavior assessment (FBA), a structured analysis of the triggers and maintaining factors that sustain the behavior, and then building an intervention around it.

That same assessment now anchors a wider set of services. Behavior analysts and the providers they work for are writing family crisis and safety plans. They assemble go-bags and emergency profiles, such as the National Autism Association’s pre-filled safety booklet and Autism Speaks’ first-responder toolkit, and, in some cases, provide training to local police and paramedics directly. The skill set fits: behavior analysts built Safety-Care, a crisis-prevention and de-escalation curriculum used across schools and human-services agencies. That clinical work now extends to safety planning and first-responder training, work no insurer reimburses for. (Coleman, 2024)

The reimbursement does not follow. Payers cover ABA through a defined set of adaptive-behavior CPT codes, 97151 through 97158, which cover assessment and direct treatment of the client. Community education, first-responder training, and family safety planning sit outside those codes. Providers that take the work on absorb the cost, treating it as goodwill, risk management, or both. (Autism Awareness & De-escalation Training Programs, n.d.) The clinical case for it is strongest exactly where the billing case is weakest.

Texas’s mandate takes effect for officers entering training in 2026, the most concrete test yet of whether classroom hours change street outcomes. It is a test no state has yet figured out how to score.

AT A GLANCE

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