Bart Barta: Training First Responders for Autism Encounters

Welcome to Why Not Me the World? Podcast hosted by
Tony Mantor, broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join
us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will
make you laugh, some will make you cry. Real life
people who will inspire and show that you are not
alone in this world. Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,
and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi,
I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World?
Humanity over Handcuffs the Silent Crisis special event. Joining us
to is Bart Barter. He is a retired law enforcement
commander with over thirty one years of experience. He joins
us today to discuss his company, Autism Safety one oh one,
whose mission is to provide first responders with the necessary
tools and tactics to achieve optimal outcomes when interacting with
individuals on the autism spectrum. He possesses a wealth of
knowledge and we are just so delighted to have him
on the show. Thanks for coming on.
It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Oh, it's my pleasure if you would tell us what
you do now.
I'm a retired law enforcement commander. I had a thirty
one year law enforcement career. Eighteen years ago, my world,
the world of my family was forever changed. My wife
and I have three sons, all adults. Our youngest adult,
Sign was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder when he was
three years old. He went in for his three year
pediacor checkup. That's when the pediatrician diagnosed him, and then
we later followed up with a to the pediatric neurologists
to confirmed the pediatricians diagnosis. Not knowing anything about autism
at all, it set myself and my wife on this
journey to try to learn as much as we possibly could.
We wanted to give our son the greatest opportunity at
reaching his fullest potential in life, whatever that might be.
We didn't know at the time would he even be
able to communicate with us. He was verbal, only spoke
a few words. He engaged in a lot of echoalia
things like that, So to say we were scared would
be like an understatement. We realized that we were really
going to have to pour ourselves into him and try
to help him reach his full potential. While all of
this is going on, I'm working as a police officer
and for management role was a lieutenant at the time
at the police department in South Florida where we were living,
and I quickly realized that law enforcement was not training
its officers in how to recognize and respond to individuals
on the autism spectrum. I kept seeing stories in the
news involving encounters between law enforcement and individuals on the
autism spectrum, and they weren't favorable stories. I really felt
like we could do better in this area. So I
was working for the Coral Gables Police Department at the time,
which is a bedroom community of Miami. In the city
of Coral Gables is the University of Miami, and they
have something there called the Centers for Autism and Related Disabilities.
So I reached out to them. I see this real
need here in developing some curriculum for law enforcement. Can
you help me. I'm not an expert in autism, but
I needed to go to the experts in autism so
that we could create some evidence based training for law
enforcement officers to help them better recognize respond to individuals
with autism, so that at the end of the day,
the individuals with autism is kept safe as possible and
the officers remained safe.
If possible. So what happened out of that meeting.
They agreed to help me and assist me on this
and set me on this journey. While still working full
time for the police department, I started working with something
called the Crisis Intervention Team Training Program or C program.
It was a program that came about to aid law
enforcement officers and how to better recognize and respond to
individuals who might have mental illness. I started working with
this program in Miami Dade County probably eighteen years now,
started working with this program and started training South Florida
law enforcement officers, primarily Miami Dade County. I would come
into this forty hour block of C instruction and I
would do about a two two and a half hour
block on autism. And I did this, I don't know,
for probably for more than ten years. After doing that,
as I was getting closer to retirement and I was
still doing this training, but because of my full time
responsibilities as a law enforce of commander, couldn't really pour
myself in full time into doing this kind of training. So,
as I could see I was getting closer and closer
to retirement, my wife and I had this discussion. We
decided together to try to launch a training business, training
consulting business so that we could work with first responders
to help them better recognize and respond to individuals with autism.
That's what I've been doing ever since.
Sounds like a great idea. What happened next for you?
So I retired in the end of twenty seventeen. Before retiring,
I had launched Autism Safety one oh one. I travel
all across the United States of America, providing training primarily
to law enforcement, but I also trained firefighters, EMS, I've
trained correctional personnel, security personnel, and I really feel that
it's crucial all first responders received this training, and so
that's where I got started.
When you have a class, what does your audience look like?
Is it police, firefighters, EMTs, operators from the nine to
one to one com centers or do you talk with
each one of them individually as a group.
Generally, the class is specific to the audience. So if
it's primarily a law enforcement, say it's a police department.
I was just recently contacted by a police department in Georgia,
just outside of Atlanta. Shamily, Georgia chief of police contacted
me and asked me if I could do a couple
of eight hour trainings there for his officers and the
local law enforcement partners in that area. We've scheduled two
dates in April and I will go up there and
that class will just encompass primarily law enforcement officers. I
do trainings right now. In fact, I have some fire
rescue in South Florida. They have me come in twice
a month to provide autism training to their firefighters, and
that is just specific to firefighting. There is some overlap.
There is times occasionally, and it doesn't happen very often,
maybe less than five percent of my trainings include a
mixed first responder audience, meaning there'll be police in the
audience and there'll be firefighters in the audience. That doesn't
happen very often. Normally it's centric to whatever audience is.
So I have a training for school resource officers. People
may not realize this, but policing in schools is a
lot different than policing on the street. So I come
in and I have a background in that as well.
When I was a sergeant earlier in my career, I
used to oversee and supervise school resource officers. I have
a training specific to them. And we talk about students
with autism in the schools and things like that. Training
that I do is tailor specifically to whatever first responder
audience I'm dealing with.
What's the first thing that you tell them to start
your class off. They are sometimes going into the unknown.
They don't know whether it's autism or another mental health issue.
It could be ADHD, bipolars, gizophrenia, or anything else mental
health related with the police, sometimes they only have seconds
to make a determination. So how do you tell them
to approach it so the situation does not get out
of control, so it can be handled in a very
good way where everybody walks away knowing that they did
their very best to ultimately have a satisfying conclusion.
It's a great question. So here's the thing, right, this
is really important. I have to start off with helping
these officers understand what autism is. If you don't understand
the challenges and the needs of people with autism, you're
not going to recognize it. And unfortunately, this is what
happens in some cases too often, where law enforcement officers
do not receive meaningful training in autism, officers will oftentimes
misinterpret the person's behavior or their lack of communication, and
they'll take one course of action, where if they had
some understanding about autism, then they might take a different
course of action. I have to break it down into
its simplest part so that these officers truly understand what
it's like to be in the body of a person
with autism and understand all those unique challenges that come
along with that disability. Part of that is helping them
to understand when and where we can to try to
slow things down as much as we possibly can. We
have to be patient. We have to give them time
to process what it is that we're asking them or
telling them to do. If we expect them to immediately
respond or comply with our questions, our request, in many cases,
it's not going to happen. It's imperative that law enforce
since officers understand these challenges. Once they understand the challenges
that follow this disability, then we implement the strategies and
how to de escalate possible rice's situations or meltdowns that
might be occurring. So it's not like there's a silver
bullet here and you can come in and go, Okay,
do this every time, and then everything is wonderful, and
it's great because it is a wide spectrum and it
affects people differently. It's been said once. I think it
was doctor Stephen Shore that came out with this saying
he said, if you've met one person with autism, you've
met one person with autism. Right, No, two people with
autism are identical. And that's important too, because law enforcement officers,
we are trained to recognize pattern We are great at
recognizing patterns. If you've seen something enough times, go oh,
I know what this is. It's a little bit more
challenging when you're dealing with somebody with autism, who might
have serious communication challenges, who struggle socially, who might even
have an intellectual disability on top of that, coupled with
pull occurring mental health dishorders and other things. So let
me say this to you. And this is one thing
I hope your listeners take away if they're looking to
help law enforcement officers and their communities receive this kind
of training, is you can't do this online in a
half an hour or an hour, you can't do it.
I tell chiefs of police, they'll contact me from time
to time and they'll say bart and you come train
the troops. And I'll say, sure thing, Chief, what do
you have in mind? And they'll say, well, what about
roll calls? Now, roll calls are like briefings that occur
at the very beginning of the shift. Used to see
it like if you watch shows like Hill Street Blues.
The sergeant would come in, he would address the officers
and things and give them kind of the instructions for
the day. Those are role calls, right. Generally roll calls
don't last more than fifteen minutes to a half an hour.
So I asked the chief what do you have in mind?
And they'll say, what about a roll call? And I'll
say how long do your roll calls last? And they'll say,
we can do forty five minutes. And then I stop
them right then and there, and I tell them, Chief,
all due respect, I can come in, I can talk
to your officers for forty five minutes about individuals with autism.
But they're not going to get much out of it.
And they scratch their heads and they look puzzled. Right,
because I can't understand this, right, tell them, don't do
anything less than four hours. I hate doing four hour
trainings because when I do four hour training sessions with
law enforcement officers. I feel like this, like they're trying
to drink water from a fire hose, right. It's coming
down a fast and hard and quick, and it doesn't
allow for the engagement or the interaction that I really
like to see occur in these training sessions with law
enforcement officers. So I tell all these chiefs, I tell
all these shares, don't do anything less than eight. But
I would tell you, Tony, unfortunately a lot of law
enforcement commanders, chiefs of police and shriffs are reluctant to
do eight hour trainings. I'm very encouraged when law enforcement
agencies do eight hour trainings, but I refuse to do
anything less than four because I don't want to give
short shrift. And some people say, what about an online training?
Why don't you do online trainers? And I tell them
because one quite honestly, Tony, most police officers don't want
to watch online training. If it's more than thirty minutes,
then they start tuning out. And if they're not compelled
to sit there and watch it, they'll be easily distracted.
They'll be looking at their cell phone or one thing
or another, and they're not really learning it right, they're
not really getting it, they're not really understanding it. Is
it a lot of work to do in person training.
It is, but I personally have a vested interest in this.
Do you tell them about your son in their training?
I tell all these officers all the time, I have
a son who's twenty one years old and who is
more than likely going to come in contact with you
at some point in time. Others, it's not questioning if
it's only a matter of when they come in contact
with a law enforcement officer. In fact, there's studies recently
that show that individuals with autism are seven times more
likely to encounter a law enforcement officer than someone without autism. Okay,
so there's been some studies too recently. By the time
I think that by the time they're eighteen years old,
more than a quarter of them have already encountered a
law enforcement officer.
Wow, that's pretty staggering numbers.
I will say this, It's not all doom and gloom.
I am optimistic. I'm seeing law enforcement leaders, sheriffs, chests
of police are really starting to embrace this and understanding
that people with autism are a significant part of their communities.
They're a part of the citizenry that they serve really important.
If you want to serve your citizens, well understand your
citizens and those agencies that invest the time. I get
a lot of feedback after my trainings. Sometimes years later,
I'll have officers that will email me or they'll call
me and they'll say, I got to tell you about
this call that I went on, and let me tell
you what happened, And I'm so glad that I came
through your training because now I've felt so confident in
handling this situation and they had a successful outcome. If
you don't do this kind of training, you're setting your
officers up for failure. And I don't blame these officers.
I've seen stories in the news where officers have had
unfortunately negative contacts with individuals with autism. And if you
go and you start looking into the situation, what you
will discover In most of these cases, these officers that
you're seeing in the news that had these horrific incidents
involving individuals with autism, they'd have little to no training
in autism. Now, whose fault is that? Is that the
officer's fault. A lot of people in the autism community
and parents and caregivers, they get upset. I've seen them
say that officer should be fired, he should be suspended
without pay. And I tell them every time, I said,
have you looked in to see whether or not this
officer's had any training whatsoever? And in most cases they haven't.
Is it fair to blame the officer? Because the truth is, Tony,
you don't know what you don't know, and if you
don't have this kind of training, you're not going to understand.
That's why I do what I do, and I do
it passionately. Every time I do these trainings, I try
to bring folks in the autism community into these training sessions.
Generally it happens towards the end of the training where
I give them an opportunity to interact and engage with
these first responders, because that's where the most significant part
of this training occurs, is that interaction that curves between
individuals with autism and law enforce. And the more opportunities
we can create where we can bring people with autism
into a setting with law enforcement officers and a non
crisis situation, it's a win for the individual with autism
and it's a win for the first responder. So I
encourage these officers. I encourage these command staffs with these
police departments and these fire departments to have your personnel
regularly engage with people on the spectrum, because again, like
I said earlier, if you meet one person with autism,
you met one person with autism, and it's a wide spectrum.
When you first start talking with the officers, it's like
anything else. It can be two hours, four hours, six hours,
eight hours. At the end of any conference, whether it's
two hours all the way up to eight hours, there's
going to be certain points that they remember. There will
be certain points they will forget. How do you get
the points to cross that you feel are most vital
for them to remember? That way they do not forget it,
because as we know, it's the most important things that
they remember. Even if they forget some of the little
things that hopefully they retain that could be most important
to having a much better outcome than what it could
have been.
That's a great question, and one of the things that
I try to stress again is patients trying to slow
things down the best you possibly can. You are correct,
is officers respond to various calls for service. They're responding
based on the information that's received, and oftentimes that comes
from a dispatcher, right, a communications operator nine one operator
is giving the information the officer. So oftentimes when the
officers are arriving on the scene, they're responding with only
a little bit of information and they have to quickly
assess and determine what is going on, and sometimes only seconds,
and so they're trying to process all this information as
quickly as possible. If the individual does not have a weapon,
I mean they have a knife or a gun or
something like that, this affords us an opportunity to try
to slow things down, right, to try to practice some
patients and telling them that when you're trying to communicate
with somebody with autism, use the fewest words possible, use concrete,
simple language, because many people with autism process language differently
than the rest of us. If you tell someone with
autism freeze, that means something to you, it means something
to me, but that means something completely different to them.
You need to use simple, concrete, direct language. You need
to keep it as simple and as few words possible,
giving them as much time to respond is necessary. Right,
you may have someone who is a serious eloper and
all of a sudden, they bolt and they take off
and they start running, and maybe they're starting to run
for the middle of a busy highway or a busy street.
That officer at that point in time might have to
go hands on. They might have to use force to
stop that person. Some folks with autism have no fear
of danger, so they might just take off and run
out right in the middle street, and in that case,
officer has to go hands on immediately. But one of
the things I try to tell them, if ever possible,
try to avoid touching them. If somebody with autism is
actively trying to hurt another person, just because you have
a disability doesn't give you a license to afflict violence
on another person. You might have to stop that person
from inflicting violence onto another person. You might have to
go hands on. And we talk about what you should
do if in fact you do go hands on with
somebody with autism. We give some tips and strategies and
things like that. Those are the key things right there
is helping them understand one, the processing of your instructions
and your language and understanding this too. Tony and I
can bring this up. You have a large percentage of
people with autism that are nonverbal or low verbal, and
if they can speak, it might only be a few words. Now,
having said that, just because someone doesn't have verbal language
doesn't mean they don't understand you. Doesn't mean they're even
low intelligence, right or low IQ. It doesn't mean that
they might not even be able to communicate with you.
And we talk about the other ways in which people
who are nonverbal are low verbal, can and oftentimes do communicate,
and we talk about how to deal with that. Sensory
issues are also something that we have to address when
we're dealing with individuals with autism. Why because you're a
law enforce and often you're coming to the scene right,
oftentimes in a sensory machine. You're driving a patrol car,
right that has lights bright lights, that has a siren,
and you're coming onto the scene. That just in and
of itself can create so much anxiety in that person
with autism that now it's escalated the situation in this person, right, So,
now what do we need to do to try to
help them manage their anxiety that they're experiencing because of
the sensory input that they're receiving. So we address things
like that, how to turn off your lights, how to
turn off your siren if you can safely turn off
your lights safely and turn off your siren, Your radio,
your police radio. Sometimes the sound of the police radio
can be unselling for some people of autism. A barking
canine companion, these kinds of things can be on for
people with autism. So we address the sensory issues. We
address that as well in the trainees.
Yeah, that's great, perfect. Actually, there's a wide spectrum in autism. However,
there's also a wide spectrum in how we treat people
with autism. The key is how we bridge that gap
between autism and the first responders. The first ones that
respond is always thought of as being the police. So
it's very important that we do bridge that gap. For sure,
hypothetical here, what happens if they have a knife, not
a gun, just a knife. They're not showing real aggressive behavior.
It's a dangerous thing to have, for sure, what do
you advise them to do? So in the end, the
outcome is one that everybody is happy with.
I've never been asked this question before, but that's a
great question. So normally what happens in law enforcement agencies
is this is a part from autism. I'm going to
address this because this is where most of this will occur.
Law enforcement agenties will create scenario based training in which
law enforcement officers will either have to move up the
use of force continuum or move down the use of
force continuum. For example, when you start to introduce lethal
weapons to a scenario, it increases the chances obviously for
a higher use of force response to whatever that officer
is dealing with. Let's say it's a knife. One of
the things too that officers are trained to do, especially
when you're dealing with individuals who have knives, if and
whenever possible. And I have to say this, if and
whenever possible, because every situation is different. Okay, there are
no two situations that are identical. What is your friend
is time and distance. If I can create more distance
between me and that person with that knife, it increases
my chances of survival and the more time if I
try to engage this person in conversation, right, we can
hopefully de escalate the situation. I will say this. There
is a scenario that I use in my training, and
this is a story that came out of an agency
in Canada years ago. This agency in Canada had created
a registry for individuals with autism. And what I really
liked about this registry. Say, for example, say nine to
one one gets a call to the residents. This home
is already been flagged because the caregiver or the parent
or guardian has registered their address with the nine one
one center, and so when first responders are en route,
the dispatcher at the nine one one center will let
the officer or the firefighter know that there is an
occupant in that home with autism, and they will provide
them their name, physical descriptors, things like that. But on
top of all that, it'll include things like does the
person have sensory issues? Does the person have communication challenges?
Are they verbal or are they nonverbal? Are they low verbal?
It could talk about whether or not they have self
regulating behaviors that they might engage in to try to
calm themselves down, and so try to help officers understand this.
Part of that includes things like what sort of things
might also help calm them down. You'll see individuals with autism,
many of them have developed hoping mechanisms that will help
them self regulate, that will help them manage their behaviors
right which oftentimes to us neurotypical as folks that don't
have autism, it might look unusual. It might look odd
right because there's maybe hand flapping, there might be body rocking.
There could be a number of different things that's going on.
To the outside person or somebody who's not familiar with autism,
they'll think, wow, this looks really strange. These sorts of
things can be included on the registry. Also included on
the registry is whatever that person's special interest is, what
are the things that they like. This particular department in Canada,
when they were en route to this call, they received
the call on a young man with autism who had
barricaded himself in the basement of the family home with
a knife. No one else in the home but this
young man with a knife. So now these responding police
officers are going to this residence and they learn all
this about this young man with autism. Guess what else
they learned, Tony. They learn through this registry that his
special interest was ice hockey. So when the two first
responding units got there on the scene, they headed down
to the basement. But because of training, they know that
time and distance can help keep them alive, so they
kept a safe distance between themselves and this young man.
What do you think they started talking to him about
Tony and they arrived on the scene ice hockey? Why
because that's his special interest. So what happened They started
to build some repport with this young man by engaging
him in what was his special interest. After talking to
him for about fifteen to twenty minutes about ice hockey, right,
they said to him, Mike, we would love to talk
to you about ice hockey, but you've got to put
the knife down. And what do you think Mike did Tony?
He put the knife down. So now, Tony, let's be fair.
Is this going to work in every situation? No? Probably not,
but it can. And the reason why it worked in
this particular situation was because these officers had information. They
had knowledge about this person that helped them when they
arrived on the scene to de escalate a very volatile situation.
They had not received any training, they had not received
this information, things might have been handled much differently.
Absolutely, in closing, what do you feel is input that
the listeners here that needs to be covered in what
you do?
Let me just say this real quick to your listeners.
It is important that first responders receive training in how
to recognize and respond to autism. There's also a part
that I think sometimes we're missing, and that is this,
as parents, as caregivers and guardians, we need to prepare
our loved ones for interactions with law enforcement and with
other first responders. What does that mean? We need to
help provide them with some education and some training and
how to safely self disclose their autism to a first responder.
I'm a firm believer Tony that if a person with
autism at the onset of a contact with a law
enforcement officer, the chances of that interaction going well have
just increased substantially, even if the officers had zero training
and autism. If an officer approaches a my sign and
he says, hi, sir, what are you doing? And my
son says, officer, my name is Daniel and I have autism.
Can I show you my wallet card? The officer is
going to say sure, and then my son's going to
reach into his back pocket and he's going to take
out his wallet and there's a card that's in his
wallet that says my name is Daniel, and I have autism.
Inspectrum disorder, and when I get nervous or anxious, I
do the following things, and then it'll say things like
it'll be some strategies to help me better understand you,
please do the following. Then on the back of the
card is a mergency contact information that includes my name
and phone number, my wife's name and phone number, so
if law enforcement officers will reach out and contact us.
The wallet card is just one of many tools that
can help individuals with autism and help safely self disclose
their autism. They want to learn more about the wallet card,
they can go to the website for the wallet card.
It's www. Just Just or if you go to that website,
there is a link there on the page where the
pair and our caregiver can request a personalized wallet card
for their loved one. What I love about this is
each card can be personalized because autism is not a
one size fits all disability, so they can customize the
card to speak to whatever unique challenges and needs their
loved one has and include the emerency contact information on
the back. The wallet card is free. It doesn't cost
anybody of dying. I'm proud to say I've been a
part of that wallet card program now for over ten years.
It was a partnership between the University of Miami Centers
for Autism Related Disabilities, the Disability Independence Group, and the
Coral Gables Police Department. Think about that wallet card. If
there's one takeaway here today that you can take action
all and help your loved one on the spectrum, the
wallet card would be the one thing that I would
suggest that.
They get good. I appreciate you coming on, great conversation,
a lot of great information.
Thank you, Tony. It's been a pleasure, and I just
again i'll tell you thank you for what you do.
You provide a tremendous public service to this autism community,
and it's large and it's broad. Keep doing the great
work that you're doing.
I appreciate it. Thanks again. Thanks for taking the time
out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today.
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