Published by William H. Fowlke. The downloadable document can be found here. 

We have all seen news reports or viewed body cam video of officers trying to detain or arrest individuals who have Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). When things go bad the incident is often followed by the finger pointing of 20/20 hindsight. You may even have found yourself saying, “boy that doesn’t look good” or “what was that officer thinking?” On the other hand, we know of officers coming to the rescue of children with ASD who were lost, having an emotional meltdown, or difficulty dealing with a world that is frightening. What makes the difference between the negative and positive outcomes?

In the cases that go bad officers may not realize they are dealing with individuals who have ASD. They confused the individual’s “odd behavior” with drug abuse, intoxication, or deceptive criminal behavior. Chances are that had these officers been trained to recognize ASD behaviors the outcome would have been dramatically different with a positive ending.

One in 54 children is diagnosed with ASD in the United States. Utah has the second-highest population of individuals with ASD. There are approximately 15,000 children and 8,000 adults who are on the spectrum in Utah. There is much speculation why, but the research is inconclusive. In other words, we do not know why there is such a high number of individuals in Utah who have ASD.

In response to the need to train law enforcement officers to recognize ASD behaviors the Utah Attorney General’s VirTra Training Center is offering Autism Awareness Training for First Responders. The program was developed by VirTra®  in collaboration with the South West Autism Resource and Research Center, the Autism Council of Utah, and the Utah Attorney General’s Autism Advisory Board.

Utah’s Governor and legislature have also responded to the need for more police training for this special population. Governor Cox signed H.B. 162 Peace Officer Training Amendments and H.B. 334 Special Needs Training for Law Enforcement. These bills require Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST) to include 16 hours of training on ASD and other mental illnesses during an agency’s yearly 40-hour in-service training requirement. These bills specifically outline that officers and deputies have training in intervention responses to ASD and other mental health issues.

The training provided by the Attorney General’s Training Center will qualify for some of the new legislative requirements. The program includes a multimedia presentation, interactive virtual reality scenarios, classroom instruction, review of officer body cam video, and in person discussions with leaders and volunteers representing Utah’s Autism community. The objectives for the program are to aid officers to identify ASD behaviors and provide tools for a positive interaction. The training is not designed to teach officers how to diagnose individuals with ASD. The training is delivered at no-cost to agencies and qualifies for International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training (IADLEST) certification.

Ken Wallentine, Chief of Police for West Jordan Police Department said this about his department’s training experience at the Attorney General’s training center:

“In the summer of 2020, the West Jordan Police Department partnered with the Utah Attorney General training center to deliver a unique new multidisciplinary training experience, created in conjunction with VirTra and the Autism Council of Utah. Every West Jordan PD School Resource Officer and DARE Officer completed the training in August 2020, before the new school year began.

The training experience, combining virtual reality scenarios in the VirTra 300® with small group discussions with officers and community members with live autism experiences, was overwhelmingly successful. Acting on the encouragement of the first officers, the autism training experience was incorporated into the West Jordan PD quarterly in-service training for all officers.

We’re astonished at the positive comments from our officers. They feel much better prepared to handle calls for service involving persons with autism and to practice empathy in an effective way. We’re grateful for the partnership with the Attorney General training center and VirTra, along with members of the Utah Council on Autism in facilitating this vital training experience.”

Calleen Kenney, President of the Autism Counsel of Utah had this to say about her experience working with police officers:

“As a volunteer, I have really enjoyed helping members of our law enforcement and first responder communities learn more about the autism community! I am so impressed with their willingness to share experiences and ask questions. As a caregiver, knowing that my family will be a little more supported in times of crises is invaluable. I really think this training will save and change lives. I truly appreciate all the departments, teams and individuals that are involved and participating in this training. I believe that every officer going into the field needs to understand how high the possibilities are that they will encounter an individual with autism and to be more prepared to appropriately handle and support the situation.”

You can schedule Autism Awareness Training for First Responders for members of your department by contacting Scott Carver at 385-867-9887 / [email protected] or Will Fowlke at 801-608-5356 / [email protected]. Be safe and be prepared for the unexpected.

By:
William H. Fowlke
Utah Attorney General’s Training Center
4-9-2021

According to the CDC, 1 in 53 people in the United States are diagnosed with autism. As such, law enforcement officers, who interact with countless individuals, are certain to come into contact with a person on the autism spectrum at some point during their career. Unfortunately, there are instances that prove not every agency is equipped and educated in terms of communicating efficiently with people on the spectrum.

Officers are not doctors, and therefore, they should never be expected to diagnose any subject. However, there are signs to be aware of that may signal that the officer is interacting with an autistic person. Failure to recognize these signs has led to officers mistaking autistic behaviors for criminal ones, including resistance or even drug use. Unfortunate cases have happened where autistic individuals have been unnecessarily traumatized and left with minor injuries because an officer was unable to tell the difference between their autism and misleading behaviors.

Due to an apparent lack of knowledge about the condition, partnered with the fact that autism is prevalent in society, VirTra and the Southwest Autism Research and Resource Center (SARRC) worked together to create a certified virtual Autism Awareness course for law enforcement. Within a simulator displaying cutting-edge technology and graphics, officers can verbally interact with an on-screen subject who displays signs of autism in these autism awareness scenarios. With numerous branching options to resolution and a thorough virtual walkthrough of what autism is, officers will enhance their skills and help keep the autism community safer.

Now, a year since the course has made its debut in VirTra’s V-VICTA™ lineup, the course has been installed on simulators around the country and has attracted praise from experts. Just recently, Holly Blanc Moses, host of The Autism ADHD Podcast, graciously invited Lon Bartel and Daniel Openden to guest on a recent episode. Bartel, VirTra’s Director of Training & Curriculum, along with Openden, CEO of SARRC, were the creators and masterminds behind the Autism Awareness curriculum project and are always eager to further educate law enforcement as well as the public.

Just a few of the many tips shared by all three experts during the discussion include:

• If possible, find out if there are specific communication needs and challenges before the encounter. This could be communicated to the officer by a parent, sibling, friend, etc.
• Turn off the lights on the patrol car and turning down the volume on your radio, as they might cause a sensory overload.
• Try to find an area to communicate where it is quiet and there are less people.
• Build rapport with community members with autism, including their parents and guardians.

To learn more about Autism Awareness and how to obtain this course and various other certified curriculum, click here.

Mental Illness training is no longer important knowledge: it is crucial knowledge.

Now more than ever, officers must know how to properly recognize and interact with every member of their community. VirTra makes teaching this curriculum easy and effective by providing instructors with 15 hours of nationally-certified training material and professionally filmed simulation training scenarios.

Our Mental Illness Training: A Practical Approach curriculum includes training manuals, slide presentations, pre and post-tests, evaluations and real-life scenarios to help instructors teach the concept in the classroom, then cement the teachings by practicing the concepts in a simulator.

This training also includes interviews with individuals that have experienced mental illness and what they feel law enforcement should know from their perspective. These insightful videos are critical in helping with empathy and understanding.

Through this curriculum, officers learn to recognize a variety of mental illness symptoms—including depression, suicide, anxiety, trauma, PTSD and schizophrenia—and communicate and engage in the proper techniques for the situation.

Learn more about our Mental Illness training here.

Or watch officers engage in real Mental Illness scenarios below:

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to find other ways of maximizing training with VirTra’s curriculum.

As you may be aware, IADLEST offers a National Certification Program (NCP), which serves as a standard for police training. As such, the program sets a higher standard of training for training companies—such as VirTra—and vendors to provide quality education and training content to our law enforcement nationwide.

NCP certification standards meet and often exceed individual State certification requirements, ensuring training is accepted by all participating POST organizations for training credit.

For this reason and more, VirTra has been submitting V-VICTA™—Virtual Interactive Coursework Training Academy—curriculum for NCP certification. VirTra is currently the only simulator company that offers certified curriculum for officers, which comes free with every law enforcement simulator.

With the NCP seal proudly displayed on the front of each coursework, agencies know they are provided with content that has gone through a rigorous approval process and meets most POST standards.

In addition to providing quality training to officers, V-VICTA certified curriculum also saves agencies time and money. Think about how many department resources are spent reviewing training, the time and money required to approve a single hour of curriculum.

Or consider the millions of dollars cities spend defending themselves or settling lawsuits due to lack of training and police wrongdoings. Litigation fees, settlement fees and court-ordered payments can all be minimized with officers who are properly and adequately trained. Officers trained to react appropriately to a variety of situations are far less likely to find themselves involved in lawsuits due to alleged wrongdoing.

However, creating these coursework materials is no easy task. When preparing to submit materials for certification, VirTra must meet a series of general requirements, such as: extensive research, citations, having correct knowledge retention format, comprehensive testing materials, scoring rubric, pre-test, post-test, class evaluation forms and much more.

Once submitted, the curriculum is thoroughly reviewed and vetted by professionals in the field. Professionals include some with Masters degrees in Instructional Design and Education Technology and years of real-world experience. Curriculum is then returned in a few weeks with any edits, comments and final approval or rejection. With approval comes a two-year certification and promise to our clients with the highest quality training.

To date, VirTra has submitted 17 V-VICTA courses through NCP with a total of 60+ hours. Our most recent certified curriculum was Autism Awareness, a combination of classroom materials and interactive scenarios designed to help officers distinguish autistic behavior from those that mimic others, such as indicators for drug/alcohol use or deceptive behavior.

This curriculum was co-created through a partnership with SARRC—Southwest Autism Research & Resource Center—and utilizes their industry insight and expertise. Together, this partnership resulted in curriculum that helps mitigate the difficulties law enforcement face when encountering people who may be on the spectrum.

Other critical curriculum created for law enforcement include: Active Threat/Active Killer, Contact and Cover Concepts, High-Risk Vehicle Stop, Mental Illness for Contact Professionals, Tourniquet Application Under Threat and more. Each of these curricula are NCP certified, ensuring the highest quality for agencies that implement this curriculum into their training sessions.

Instructors can train well, knowing all content is up-to-date, certified and designed for maximum skill transfer. To learn more about VirTra’s NCP-approved curriculum, please contact a specialist.

Although the presentation of autism varies significantly among individuals, it affects every age group and occurs in all ethnic and socioeconomic groups.

ASD—Autism Spectrum Disorder— is a pervasive developmental disorder that encompasses autistic disorder, Asperger’s disorder and pervasive developmental disorder—not otherwise specified. Formerly, each disorder had its own distinct criteria. Now only one set of criteria exists with all three under the single diagnosis.

As such, ASD is characterized by social impairments, communication difficulties, and restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior.

Estimates suggest that 50,000 teens with ASD transition into adulthood each year. This is why VirTra is addressing autism in its latest V-VICTA™—VirTra –Virtual Interactive Coursework Training Academy— curriculum launch due to the difficulties law enforcement face when encountering people who may be on the autism spectrum.

According to a 2017 study from the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute at Drexel University, an estimated one in five teenagers with autism was stopped and questioned by the police before age 21, and 5 percent were arrested. And according to research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, people with disabilities, including those on the autism spectrum, are five times more likely to be incarcerated than people in the general population, and “civilian injuries and fatalities during police interactions are disproportionately common among this population.”

To curb these potential negative encounters between law enforcement and individuals on the autism spectrum, VirTra has committed their most recent efforts to provide meaningful, realistic and timely education to law enforcement through its new autism curriculum.

To ensure police officers are equipped with the right skills to effectively and safely communicate with those with ASD, VirTra has teamed up with Southwest Autism Research & Resource Center (SARRC). Through SARRC’s global expertise in the area of autism, VirTra was able to establish comprehensive coursework and a series of simulator scenarios to assist law enforcement in learning the proper communication tactics.

While VirTra normally uses professional actors when filming scenarios, for this curriculum, VirTra made a deliberate and thoughtful decision to hire adults and teens with an autism diagnosis to represent the many different scenarios.

Law enforcement members who participate in this course will receive lesson plans, test and pre-tests. They will be walked through each lesson via an on-screen instructor and go through scenarios designed to teach officers how to properly talk through situations. The autism scenarios are not simply “shoot-don’t-shoot” situations; rather, the scenarios are made to enhance verbal skills and awareness of what the presentation of ASD may look like while working in the field.

With a growing number of diagnoses, as well as more teens transitioning to adulthood each year, there is a higher chance officers will encounter a person on the spectrum. To avoid unnecessary trauma of those with ASD and scrutiny of your agency, VirTra and SARRC firmly believe extensive training and education is the right path.

To receive the autism curriculum as well as any other new V-VICTA curriculum, your department must be a current VirTra law enforcement customer with an annual service agreement. For those wishing to set up an annual service agreement or re-establishing an outdated one, contact a VirTra specialist.

Over the course of two years, VirTra has been collaborating with Southwest Autism Research & Resource Center (SARRC) to create and launch a progressive and interactive training curriculum with corresponding video scenarios to teach law enforcement officers how to recognize and interact with autistic individuals. The curriculum aims to help officers recognize signs of autism and develop strategies/skills to improve interaction and minimize risk for both officer and civilian.

To avoid unnecessary trauma of those with ASD and scrutiny of law enforcement agencies, SARRC and VirTra firmly believe extensive education and skills-based training is the right path toward keeping everyone safe.

According to the CDC, approximately 1 in 54 children are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and estimates suggest that 50,000 teens with ASD transition into adulthood each year, increasing the likelihood of interaction between law enforcement and individuals with ASD. And yet, only 45% of officers surveyed say they have received training on interacting with people with ASD. Often, this depends on the region and could be incident-based – meaning some departments do not train on the subject until an unfortunate incident happens.

VirTra and SARRC are working to increase the number of officers trained on the topic of autism by providing departments with detailed curriculum and state-of-the-art virtual scenarios needed to effectively prepare officers for proper interaction.

Law enforcement officers can learn and practice these lessons through VirTra’s new Autism Awareness curriculum. Through this coursework, officers can prevent poorly-handled incidents with ASD individuals while creating a better relationship with every member of their community.

Outside Stimuli

With a growing number of diagnoses, as well as more teens transitioning to adulthood each year, officers should know that ASD can cause significant social, emotional, communicative and behavioral challenges, which can lead to a different response to police presence than what is expected.

Be aware that people with ASD may react differently to outside stimuli such as lights, sounds and physical contact. Their reactions can range from agitation to becoming transfixed or silent. Minimize stress and confusion—if it is safe to do so—by turning off your squad car lights and siren, lowering the volume on your radio and taking a step back before asking questions.

Ask Questions

Ask about the ASD subject’s triggers—specific sounds or movements that could set the person off—in order to avoid sparking a negative reaction. Follow up by asking what the best form of communication for that person is. An estimated one-third of people with autism are nonverbal. Asking questions and giving directions may have a greater effect through the use of pictures, sign language or simple vocabulary.

Form a Relationship

Before asking questions about the incident, spend a few minutes forming a relationship with the individual. Ask them questions about their interests or favorite items. Throughout the interaction, remind the individual that they are safe, but refrain from using phrases like “you’re not in trouble.” The subject might not hear the word “not” and focus on the word “trouble.”

Be aware that some autistic traits can be misconstrued, such as lack of eye contact or too much eye contact, no expression, unusual speaking patterns or repetitive body movements. In order to achieve effective communication, be factual, allow ample time for the person to process and respond, offer reassurance, talk in a calm voice and avoid making sudden movements and sounds.

Exposure

Parents, caregivers or teachers should expose children with ASD to police officers early on. Let them become familiar and comfortable with how they look – the type of uniforms, and that they always have a badge. Explain that officers are safe, and they often arrive at times when someone needs help. This prevents children from growing up with the thought that a police officer means someone is going to jail or be arrested.

If children hear this information from a trusted adult combined with having positive interactions with police officers, they may be less likely to become fearful if they must speak to an officer at some point in their lives.

Are you interested in learning more? Contact us to learn more about our V-VICTA curriculum and take the first step towards better training.

TEMPE, Ariz. — April 28, 2020 — VirTra, Inc. (NASDAQ: VTSI) (“VirTra”), a global provider of training simulators for the law enforcement, military, educational and commercial markets, has released new V-VICTA (VirTra Virtual Interactive Coursework Training Academy) training curriculum designed to help law enforcement professionals bridge the communication gap and interact more effectively, and positively, with individuals with autism. To develop the Autism Awareness simulation training program, VirTra partnered with the renowned experts at SARRC (Southwest Autism Research and Resource Center).

This first-of-its-kind curriculum and virtual reality scenarios, include actors diagnosed with autism as well as modules covering a variety of topics, including recognition, communication strategies and best practices for law enforcement officers.

According to the most recent data from the CDC, 1 in 54 children are diagnosed with autism in the United States, and estimates suggests that 50,000 teens with autism transition into adulthood each year. The growing number of diagnoses and increasing population indicate that it is highly likely that a law enforcement officer will come into contact with someone on the autism spectrum.

“I think helping police officers understand the social differences with people with autism that they might interact with is what’s really critical,” says Dr. Daniel Openden, president and CEO of SARRC. “Usually training stops at talking to people, not practice with feedback, and so I go back to what I said earlier: Knowledge-based didactic training for police officers is good if we want to increase knowledge, but if we really want to change behavior and interactions out on the street, then we have to do behavior-based training. That’s what they built into the technology, and that’s what’s really going to make a difference.”

The V-VICTA curriculum was designed by VirTra’s in-house subject matter experts and SARRC professionals, and has been previewed and beta tested by some of VirTra’s current law enforcement customers. Both the written lesson plan and simulator scenarios were reviewed extensively by various members of law enforcement around the country.

Chief Allen Muma of Jerome Police Department, Arizona, who tested the curriculum, commented: “I just fell in love with it. VirTra is forward-looking. It’s not just shoot/don’t shoot. Now, they’re offering scenarios and more training, so you get this auditory or visual learning from watching it, but then you get that kinesthetic learning from actually practicing what you just learned, which actually is proven to hold in your mind longer.”

Lon Bartel, Director of Training and Curriculum at VirTra, added: “We hope that by offering this new curriculum, officers will be better equipped to handle an encounter with autistic persons. If we can educate officers so that they know what signs and behaviors to look for, and how to respond appropriately, then we will reach better outcomes.”

The Autism Awareness curriculum has been added to VirTra’s ever-expanding library and is available to customers with VOS® 4.6 or later and will be delivered during their Annual Service Visit if they are on a current plan that provides one. For more information about this cutting-edge curriculum, visit VirTra’s autism training information page here.

About SARRC
Established in 1997, the Southwest Autism Research & Resource Center (SARRC) is an internationally recognized nonprofit that conducts innovative research, provides evidence-based practices, disseminates effective training and builds inclusive communities for individuals with autism and their families. SARRC is dedicated to autism research, education, evidence-based treatment, and community outreach. Additionally, SARRC is one of the only autism organizations in the world that provides a lifetime of services for individuals and their families while also conducting cutting edge research.

About VirTra
VirTra (NASDAQ: VTSI) is a global provider of judgmental use of force training simulators, firearms training simulators and driving simulators for the law enforcement, military, educational and commercial markets. The company’s patented technologies, software, and scenarios provide intense training for de-escalation, judgmental use-of-force, marksmanship and related training that mimics real-world situations. VirTra’s mission is to save and improve lives worldwide through practical and highly-effective virtual reality and simulator technology. Learn more about the company at www.VirTra.com.

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