This page discusses my own experiences in Melbourne, Australia. It's not intended to replace or in any way supplement Dennis Debbaudt's books, DVDs, websites or presentations which cover this topic in great detail. I originally wrote this essay for autistic adults. (Oh, and while I remember: outside North America, Lindsay is a male name.)
I grew up in a Melbourne suburb called Brighton where my father was a part-time magistrate. That's what we call judges who preside over courts that deal with small-time matters. The Brighton court was normally in session only on Monday mornings, to deal with the weekend crop of drunk drivers, brawlers, speeders and so on. If police needed a special sitting, for example to set bail in midweek for an alleged offender, all they had to do was walk across the street from the police station to the Town Hall where my father worked. Because the courthouse was right behind the Town Hall, court could be sitting in two minutes.
My father had cordial relations with the police and, by extension, so did I. Sergeant Jack Ford, officer-in-charge at the Brighton police station, lived just a few houses from us. I saw him nearly every day, liked him and was happy to wave to him as I went past his house on my bike. Or past the police station on my bike. Wherever. His daughter Sue went to Firbank, a private Brighton school. Even though she was a couple of years older, I'd usually stop and chat to her whenever our paths crossed.
My father died when I was 13. As a gesture of respect, Jack Ford detailed two of his constables, who had been bricklayers before joining the police, to build us a fence at the front of our property. We were never wealthy. Now, with my father gone, even less. Soon, courtesy of Victoria Police, we had a solid, beautiful brick fence which endures and doesn't seem to have aged at all.
For many years until around 1963, Victoria Police drove Studebaker Larks similar to the one in the picture. They were great cars, with a V8 burble you could almost dance to. Powerful and very fast when stock standard, they had all been modified in the police garage to make them just about the fastest cars on the road at that time. If, while driving, you turned the ignition off and then back on again very quickly, they would backfire with a deafening crack. I was out talking to the guys who were building our fence when some of their colleagues drove past and backfired their car for a joke. The fence builders nearly jumped out of their skin, while I didn't react. I react very quickly if someone touches me, or lunges at me, or throws (or pretends to throw) something at me but I don't react to sudden loud noise. Not outwardly. For a couple of seconds I experience what I can best describe as a series of distortion waves. But they don't show on the surface.
So there's these policemen, laughing and embarrassed about being frightened half to death and there's me, not laughing, just standing there. The policemen take offence at this. I'm supposed to have been scared and laughing with them but I can't fake it quickly. Can't fake it at all. They didn't look at me again after that, didn't acknowledge me when I spoke to them.
It's important to remember that police react typically for NTs and the ones chosen have heightened aggression. Society gives them quite a lot of power.
After that, Jack Ford didn't greet me quite so cordially. At fifteen, no longer a child, I took a lot of unauthorised time off school. Most of the time, I was too depressed to go. I didn't shake it off until the next year, when I changed schools. As a small child, I'd sometimes hide in my parents' wardrobe (closet) if the world got too much. I'd stay there for hours. It was calm, smelled rather nice and was dark; a great place to zone out.
At 15, I was too big for the wardrobe. The only space in the house big enough to hide in was under my mother's bed. I was sometimes there all day, from the time she left in the morning until it was time for my sister to get home from school. Then it was time for me to go to a nearby milk bar where I had an afternoon job. Who could I talk to about this feeling of hopelessness? No-one at all. There were no school counsellors back then. In the days before Medicare, a psychiatrist cost a fortune. Would he have done any more than mouth platitudes? I didn't think so. He would have asked me why I felt hopeless and told me to get a life. Every once in a while Jack Ford came around. I heard him knocking and knocking. His police instinct told him that someone was at home but I didn't answer the door. He always went away if I was patient.
On Saturday mornings, I was out and about as usual. Sometimes because I didn't have to go to school but also because I had nowhere to hide. I would see Jack Ford mowing his lawn and wave. He waved back. But his daughter told me she wasn't allowed to speak to me any more. Jack Ford could have checked with my school and had me charged with truancy, but never did. Was he being kind to me? My mother? He wasn't the kind of person to duck when he scented trouble but might well have asked himself just what he was going to do if he did intervene and decided that there was nothing he could do. So he stopped coming around on school days.
In Victoria, you get a driver's licence when you turn 18. What do 16yos do? Ride bikes and catch public transport like any other kid. It was around 10pm, midweek during school holidays. My friend Danny and I were riding our bikes to his home in Armadale, about 10km away. As always, when we reached the Nepean Highway we rode off the road onto the footpath that borders Dendy Park. At the time, pushbikes were considered to be road vehicles and not allowed to be ridden on footpaths. All the kids rode on this footpath though, because they considered riding on the Nepean Highway something close to suicide. In 1963, it was two lanes of almost continuous high-speed traffic. Pedestrians were injured or killed all the time crossing it.
We were about halfway past Dendy Park when a police van drew level with us and a voice shouted: "Hey you kids, get off the footpath!". We did. We rode straight into the park and along the grass. The voice obviously meant us to get off the footpath onto the highway and was now displeased. We were "smart-arses" to those police, no doubt. So they drove their van up over the kerb, across the footpath, through the flower beds into the park after us. Danny and I shouted as one: "Split up!" and we peeled off in opposite directions. They went after Danny because as well as yelling, he made a peel-off gesture so he'd become the "ringleader" and they'd caught him.
Once before, when I was ten, I abandoned someone I liked to his fate and I'd always regretted it. I regret it to this day. By then, I'd developed a coping strategy for a similar situation and it was this: never do that again. I went back to Danny and the police. "What's your name? Where do you live? What's your date of birth? Where were you coming from? Where are you going to? Why were you riding your bikes on the footpath?" I answered the questions mechanically and the policeman said: "Aren't you Ron Weekes' son?" I said that I was. He said I should have known better, brought up the way I was, to break the law. Danny told him that obeying the law in this case was a good way to commit suicide. He said it calmly and was polite but received a backhander across the face. I told the officer that I and all the local kids did exactly the same and had been doing it for as long as I could remember. My turn for a backhander. He took the valves out of our tyres and told us to walk home. We could get the valves back next day at the Brighton police station. In a straight line across the park, we were only 300 metres from my place. I told Danny I had dozens of extra valves so we walked our bikes back, put in new valves, pumped up our tyres and Danny stayed with me instead.
This was par for the course in 1963. I didn't feel in any way victimised or singled out and wrote it off to experience.
Just about a year later, a Saturday, around 6pm. I had been in the State Library all afternoon. I had just left my nearest train station, Patterson, with an armload of notes and a blank expression because I was thinking only about the contents of the book I'd been studying. I wandered past the Patterson milk bar (if you're in North America, think of a White Hen Pantry or some such) and vaguely noted the police van parked in front.
I crossed Patterson Road and saw that there was a notice in the entrance of the bank in front of me advising its holiday opening hours. I stopped to read it. It was put there by bank staff for that purpose. There were no ATMs then, no net banking. To make a transaction, you had to attend in person. I hated making trips to this bank only to find it closed. There was a squeal of tyres, doors slammed, I was grabbed, spun around and my notes went flying into the gutter. Two policemen had hold of me, the very two who had just emerged from the milk bar with their food, seen me reading the notice, jumped into their van, made a U turn, exited their van and were now behaving badly.
They asked me twenty questions before I'd finished giving them my name. They were pretending that they thought I'd been casing the bank for a robbery. I tried to explain about reading the notice but it didn't come out well; I was shutting down and my speech was going fast. I was backhanded several times and hurled into the gutter on top of my notes. The police were working themselves into a rage because they weren't getting standard responses and therefore I had to be a smart-arse. In the gutter they kicked me a few times and whatever they were saying was just babble to me by then. A parting kick and they were off with another squeal of tyres.
Once I got home, my mother took one look at me and for the first time I could remember grew murderously angry. She was on the phone to Jack Ford almost instantly and she was screaming. Jack was there in what seemed to be just seconds. By then, he knew that I was kinda different, to say the least. He'd heard the word "autistic" mentioned in reference to me. He promised to investigate. Yep, they were his men and he didn't know where to look. The next day he came around and apologised to me, assuring me that those guys would be dealt with. I believed him. (Back then there was no ombudsman, no complaints tribunal, no internal affairs branch; no real recourse at all. An apology from the police represented a major loss of face and consequently was rare indeed.)
Let's move forward in time to 1995. A police senior sergeant has an autistic son. When I first met him, his son was five. He was a worried man, and what was worrying him was the thought of what might happen to his son when he'd be 15, out and about, doing whatever his thing might be and, perhaps, encountering police. He was only too aware of how badly such an encounter might turn out. His son is now 18. What's changed?
This policeman has not stood still. There's now a disability register and if police encounter non-standard responses they're supposed to check it. (There are several caveats here. The police have to see the bracelet being worn by the person with the disability. But they may not. Even if they do, they have to be able to get close enough to read the number engraved on it. That may not be easy if the person with a disability is enraged or distressed.) However the police are, in general, more autism aware. More disability aware, in fact. Not sufficiently so, however: no police have received disability training since 2005. Additionally, police under-reporting of their use of violence may be as high as 70%.
For a long time now, female police have been increasing in number. It's not unusual to see all-female police teams on the road. Victoria had a female Chief Commissioner for several years, despite enormous effort from the police union to get rid of her, and the guy in charge now is right for the job. For people with disabilities, a woman in charge was a great development. Women listen. They don't talk at you, they don't moralise and roll over you verbally, they tend much less to prejudge. They listen and then they act. They're more aware of difference and have a greater range of emotional response to it. They don't just shuffle their feet and look down, wishing they were somewhere else.
Not long ago I spent a few years living in the rural city of Ballarat. One way and another, I had quite a lot to do with Victoria Police and was impressed by their level of professionalism. They've come a long way in just a few years. But they're not perfect. Among them they still have a few officers of the old school, the ones who think in stereotypes and who automatically give preference to one group in the community at the expense of another. These people need to go, and go fast.
The old adage autism and the police don't mix still holds true. It's better if we have nothing to do with them. But we do, don't we? Autistic teenagers and adults can become distressed or enraged in public. If that happens and the police become involved, the episode might end with the autistic person being tasered or hit with pepper spray. If you're reading this, maybe you care for such individuals and need to know that this is likely to be a police first response if they feel that they or the public are threatened. (It's happened several times in North America.) Maybe you drive and will one day get a ticket. Or be stopped and checked for alcohol or drug consumption. Maybe we'll be burgled or assaulted. Let's hope not. But over the course of an adult lifetime there's a very good chance we'll all talk to the police at some time. And when that time comes, stay cool. If you feel that surge of rage, suppress it. It's much better for us to deal with female police. And we're entitled to advocacy in all situations. Don't ever forget that.
August 2009