A report on police interactions and people with autism may not have the same outcomes in Windsor as it did in Toronto.
The study — a collaboration between Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and York University — surveyed the caregivers of 284 Ontario teens and adults. It found one in six people with autism had at least one interaction with police over an 18-month period. In nearly one in five cases, the person ended up in physical restraints. In nearly one in three, the person was escorted to an emergency department.
Those statistics are much lower in Windsor, mainly because city police here created a system in 2011 to accommodate that situation exactly.
Sergeant Steve Betteridge says there are currently 82 people listed on an Autism Registry.
"What that allows, is if an officer is dispatched to an address, and that family has someone with autism registered with our program, that gives the responding officers an incredible amount of information," says Betteridge. "If the family has been able to provide it, what we offer there, too, is a photo of that person who's registered. Then we'll have things such as different things that may excite them or alarms them. Different tactics that may calm them down and soothe them."
While there has not been a similar study in Windsor, Sergeant Betteridge says those kinds of scenarios are rare.