In June 2019, Kenneth French was on his weekly shopping trip to Costco with his family. In line for samples, Kenneth—who was nonverbal and had a developmental disability—struck the person in front of him, Salvador Sanchez—an off-duty police officer holding his young child—in the head once. Sanchez turned around and fired 10 shots, striking Kenneth and both of his parents, who said they had both begged Sanchez not to shoot. The interaction lasted only seconds; at 32, Kenneth died at the scene. In 2021, a federal civil jury awarded the French family $17 million, citing Sanchez’s overreaction to being hit in the head (the French family claims it was a push in the back).

Unfortunately for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), violent and sometimes deadly interactions with police are not that uncommon. Misunderstandings often lead to tragic outcomes. To address and hopefully prevent tragedies like these, The Arc established its National Center on Criminal Justice and Disability (NCCJD) in 2013 with funding from the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA). The Arc’s NCCJD is the first national center in the United States that serves as a bridge between the disability and criminal justice communities and pursues safety, fairness, and justice for people with IDD. The center advocates at the intersection of disability rights and criminal justice reform, focusing on people with IDD who face greater marginalization in society.

A decade later, the NCCJD has become the preeminent center in the United States that advocates with and for victims, witnesses, suspects, defendants, and incarcerated people with IDD who are involved at all stages of the criminal justice system. NCCJD has trained more than 2,000 stakeholders in more than 12 states through the Pathways to Justice program, a unique, comprehensive, community-based program that seeks to improve access to justice for people with IDD. Each year, the center responds to more than 200 requests for information from individuals with IDD, their supporters, and criminal justice professionals (which includes law enforcement, dispatch, corrections, juvenile justice, victim service professionals, and legal professionals).

Despite the NCCJD’s efforts to create a more equitable system of justice, people with disabilities continue to face extreme disadvantages, bias, and discrimination as victims, suspects, defendants, and incarcerated persons. According to data from the National Crime Victim Survey, people with IDD are three times more likely than their nondisabled peers to be the victims of violent crime and face the highest rate of violent victimization in the United States.¹ They are also seven times more likely than those without disabilities to experience sexual assault.² Officers and investigators may question if people with IDD can be credible witnesses, even in situations where that concern is unwarranted. As a result, people with IDD are not only more likely to be victimized but also less likely to report victimization, which creates a situation where victims with IDD do not report crimes because of the fear of not being believed.

People with IDD are also overrepresented in the criminal and juvenile justice system as suspects and defendants. An astonishing 70 percent of children involved in the juvenile justice system have disabilities, including psychiatric, mental health, sensory, and intellectual disabilities.³ Compounding this concerning issue is that many youth with disabilities are in contact with the justice system for minor offenses that are often related to conduct that is a manifestation of an unrecognized disability or an identified disability that is not being appropriately addressed.

Identifying IDD is especially problematic in today’s prisons and jails. Improved screening is vital to provide basic accommodations. Experts in the disability and criminal justice field are concerned that incarcerated individuals may have undiagnosed disabilities and, as a result, may face grave challenges in a system that doesn’t see or understand those disabilities.⁴ While people with IDD make up only 2 to 3 percent of the U.S. population, statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 20 percent of prisoners and 30 percent of jail inmates reported having a cognitive disability, the most reported type of disability.⁵ This reality underscores the fact that correctional officers will interact with people with disabilities throughout their careers. From a public safety viewpoint, this fact is concerning to the disability community because common interactions with correctional officers can escalate into potentially life-threatening situations for both the officer and the community member without appropriate, effective, ongoing training.

Law enforcement officers who do not understand the disability community may harbor common misunderstandings that can result in dangerous or lethal situations. One example is when an interrogation results in a false confession—particularly disturbing because more than 25 percent of people who were later exonerated after giving a false confessions to police had characteristics of an IDD.⁶ Those with IDD can also be manipulated by a “friend” into being a perpetrator of a crime unknowingly. “Strange” or “out of the ordinary” behavior can be misperceived as suspicious behavior by law enforcement when the behavior may be a coping mechanism or normative behavior within the disability community.

While these statistics are alarming, the traumatic experiences of people with disabilities when interacting with the justice system are unacceptable. The death of Kenneth French was not an isolated case. According to a 2013 CNN article, Ethan Saylor, a 26-year-old man with Down syndrome, died from a fractured larynx when an off-duty police officer placed him in a chokehold for not paying for a second showing of a movie. Ethan’s death forced the issue of the need for disability inclusivity training for law enforcement into the national spotlight, but sadly, 10 years later, it is hard to say what—if any—progress has been made to ensure fair and equitable treatment of people with IDD encountering law enforcement. In another CNN story, in 2020 Eric Parsa, a 16-year-old with autism, was visiting one of his favorite arcades with his parents. Eric’s family struggled to calm him down and accepted the arcade staff’s offer to call the police based on a previous positive experience with officers who helped calm him down two months earlier. Arriving sheriff’s deputies, who had undergone Crisis Intervention Training, would eventually place Eric in a prone position, handcuffed, and with their full weight against him, resulting in his death. Eric’s parents warned the deputies that Eric couldn’t breathe, but the officers did not release him, and Eric died as his parents looked on in utter disbelief. They live with intense pain, blaming themselves, thinking there is something else they could have done. They are working with The Arc’s NCCJD to share their story in hopes of preventing more senseless deaths like these in the future.

No parent should have to worry whether their child will come home safe from something as innocuous as attending a movie or playing laser tag. Yet too often, parents of young or adult children with disabilities worry about whether the public, including law enforcement, firefighters, or other public safety professionals will understand their child’s disability and whether their child will be perceived as a threat, particularly in moments of crisis. The Arc’s NCCJD is working to create a world in which people with IDD like Ethan and Eric can be fully included in society, able to move about freely and safely in the world like their nondisabled peers. The harsh reality is that the world is often inaccessible, unaccommodating, and sometimes even hostile toward people with disabilities.

This hostility creates a safety concern because many disabilities are not visible. Untrained law enforcement personnel may believe they are interacting with a neurotypical individual without considering whether or how disability is involved. A 2016 study from the Ruderman Family Foundation estimated people with disabilities account for 33 to 50 percent of all people killed by law enforcement.⁷

We must do more to ensure that people with disabilities can access the world without fear of harm and to make the justice system more equitable. The Arc’s NCCJD is excited to partner with the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) to create Just Policing: Disability Inclusion Training. The training collaborates with four chapters of The Arc (The Arc of Benton County in Oregon, The Arc of New Mexico, The Arc of Indiana, and The Arc of Northern Virginia), which will work with their local police departments to offer both in-person training and virtual training through the COPS Portal. The goal is to provide 5,000 front-line law enforcement officers with training and best practices on interacting with people with disabilities. Importantly, it will also connect police departments and sheriffs’ offices with their local disability advocates, who can offer training, guidance, and ideas for community resources.

NCCJD’s Just Policing training prioritizes tolerance, anti-bias, and diversity training for the law enforcement community through a disability and intersectional lens that includes people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals to support community policing. By doing so, Just Policing seeks to address ableism and other discriminatory barriers to support community policing strategies. The training aims to enhance law enforcement personnel’s involvement and commitment to community policing by helping them better understand the culture of the disability community, awareness of invisible disabilities, and legal obligations and bring to light real-life experiences of people with IDD who have other identities that are often marginalized in society. A person’s disability, race, gender, and sexuality are not described in silos; instead, law enforcement will be trained on how those identities and cultural attributes can interact and influence a person’s approach and comfort with law enforcement.

For more than a decade, The Arc’s NCCJD has been the nation’s leader in disability awareness in the criminal justice community. In that time, there has been increased demand from law enforcement to learn more about disability inclusiveness and training. In fact, it is the number one request NCCJD receives through its information and referral line. By collaborating with the COPS Office, NCCJD seeks to build more equitable and safer communities for people with disabilities.

References

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1. Erika Harrell, Crime Against Persons with Disabilities, 2009–2019 — Statistical Tables (Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2021), https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/crime-against-persons-disabilities-2009-2019-statistical-tables.
2. Joseph Shapiro, The Sexual Assault Epidemic No One Talks About (Washington, DC: National Public Radio, 2018), https://www.npr.org/2018/01/08/570224090/the-sexual-assault-epidemic-no-one-talks-about.
3. Mary Magee Quinn et al., “Youth with Disabilities in Juvenile Corrections: A National Survey,” Exceptional Children 71, no. 3 (2005), 339–345, https://doi.org/10.1177/001440290507100308.
4. At the same time, where data are being gathered, such as traumatic brain injury, high rates of ongoing disability are being observed. Chan et al., “Rehabilitation among Individuals with Traumatic Brain Injury who Intersect with the Criminal Justice System: A Scoping Review,” Frontiers in Neurology 13 (2022), https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2022.1052294.
5. Laura M. Maruschak, Jennifer Bronson, and Mariel Alper, Disabilities Reported by Prisoners: Survey of Prison Inmates, 2016 (Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2021), https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/disabilities-reported-prisoners-survey-prison-inmates-2016.
6. Sheri Lynn Johnson, John H. Blume, and Amelia Courtney Hritz, “Convictions of Innocent People with Intellectual Disability,” 82 Albany Law Review 1031 (2018), https://www.albanylawreview.org/article/69787.
7. David M. Perry and Lawrence Carter-Long, The Ruderman White Paper on Media Coverage of Law Enforcement Use of Force and Disability (Newton, MA: The Ruderman Family Foundation, 2016), https://rudermanfoundation.org/white_papers/media-coverage-of-law-enforcement-use-of-force-and-disability/.

Images courtesy of The Arc.

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