From
The AP:
SYKESVILLE, Md. —
Maryland will be the first state to teach all law enforcement
officers about people with intellectual and developmental disabilities
in training sessions led partly by disabled people, the chairman of a
commission developing the program said.
Timothy Shriver, who also chairs the national Special Olympics,
said lessons taught by those whom the program aims to serve will have
more impact "because they don't just teach it with words, they don't
just teach it with exercises, they teach it with relationships."
Panel
members met Thursday in Sykesville to begin shaping the training
regimen. They plan to produce a curriculum for use in police academies
and in-service training for all 17,000 veteran officers starting in
2015.
The panel aims to involve people with disabilities in every lesson, either in person or through videos.
"We
want the training to be conducted by people with intellectual and
developmental differences," Shriver said in a telephone interview
Wednesday. "To our knowledge, no state has accepted that challenge as a
statewide challenge."
Shriver's mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver,
founded the Special Olympics, and his aunt Rosemary Kennedy had an
intellectual disability.
The training, mandated by the 2014
General Assembly, stems from the death in custody of a man with Down
syndrome. Robert Ethan Saylor (pictured), 26, of New Market, suffered a fractured
larynx and suffocated as three off-duty Frederick County sheriff's
deputies, moonlighting as mall security officers, tried to forcibly
remove him from a movie theater in January 2013. They were summoned to
remove Saylor because he hadn't purchased a ticket for a repeat viewing
of "Zero Dark Thirty."
The death was ruled a homicide, but a grand
jury declined to indict. Amid an outcry from Saylor's family and
national Down syndrome advocates, Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley
appointed a panel to make recommendations for greater inclusion of
intellectually and developmentally disabled people in all aspects of
society. Mandatory police training is the panel's first goal.
The
commission says California, Delaware, New Jersey, Indiana, Louisiana and
New Mexico have laws requiring some or all first responders to be
trained in interactions with people with intellectual and development
disabilities. But Maryland would be the first to have people with
disabilities as teachers in mandatory police training statewide.
The
Maryland counties of Baltimore, Howard and Montgomery already offer
some such training through Crisis Intervention Team programs. The
programs, in place in about 2,800 police agencies nationwide, teach
officers to calm excited subjects instead of automatically using force.
The
CIT model was developed at the University of Memphis mainly for dealing
with the mentally ill, but the same techniques work with intellectually
and developmentally disabled people, said Randolph Dupont, a
criminologist and clinical psychologist at the school.
Dupont said
the 40-hour CIT training regimen includes a day spent with the mentally
ill. He said no state to his knowledge has mandated CIT training for
all law-enforcement agencies.
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2014/05/22/5039028/md-panel-focuses-on-police-disability.html#storylink=cpy
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2014/05/22/5039028/md-panel-focuses-on-police-disability.html#storylink=cpy
