today we are presenting our autism awareness training for law enforcement officers over the past eight to ten years we have trained over 40 000 law enforcement officers on Autism Awareness our training combines classroom training with scenarios interactions with those with autism and a lot of discussion over the fact that our rate of autism has increased from one in ten thousand to one in 44 children today that means that law enforcement officers will be touched both personally and professionally with those with autism yes you were going to give it to you but who gave them to you to Drew who gave those to Drew the most critical fact uh for this particular training or or the takeaway is that the chronological age of those with autism differs greatly between the cognitive and developmental age so you might have a 30 year old individual with autism that you're interacting with chronologically but cognitively and developmentally he may only be five to ten years and so the question I think we pose at this point is our officers policing at their chronological level or on their cognitive developmental age in order for it to be successful we need to really focus on that chronological developmental age so preparing the officers to recognize the characteristics the signs or the symptoms of autism will better prepare them to use techniques that we're teaching in today's training how to de-escalate how to approach how to reduce the sensory input all of those factors come into play because at the end of the day we want the officer to go home safe and we want our individuals with autism to be safe too [Music]