Of course, if you are going to stick your fingers in your ears and say la la la, none of that is true, then there’s nothing helpful I can say. And yes, of course it’s true that they’re not going to look after you like family. But some help can be considerably better than none.

And in case you havent noticed, everyone stops giving a shit about autism once you turn 18. Even if you’re barely 100 pounds and look 14. That description has fit me to a T my whole life, except when I was UNDER 100 pounds and looked even younger.

They. Just. Don’t. Care. Anywhere. I’ve lived enough places to know that to be nothing but truth.

Do I think we’re going to have a completely functional general protocol established quickly? Hardly. But do I think that we can get basics that would help both sides? I don’t really think that’s impossible. For much of it, it’s not accurate to compare it to childcare or medical insurance.

I mean, is it really impossible for medic-alert bracelets to be put in place? We’re already talking about it in Nevada. I do think some other similar basic protocol can be established.

What I don’t think can happen is that every autistic establishes himself in a personal relationship with with every police officer or official he might have to know at a certain time. Could an individual? Yes, probably. But that’s so unimportant for me (since I really don’t need anything of that kind). More important for me is that we don’t naturally select for those who happen to be connected to their local police officers.

Cliff

Much of that, I think, is just because so many people aren’t directly affected by it. Yes, you can point out the connections, but they don’t feel it and find themselves forced to deal with it daily. I wouldn’t be reading this blog if I hadn’t noticed things in myself, and wondered for decades, really, about that one-letter difference between artist and autist. That’s the only daily contact I have with it. There’s a boy down the street I see in passing once every few weeks. If I know other people who are autistic, I’m blind to it, and I don’t see that they have any particular autism-related trouble getting by.

Contrast that with the trouble people have at work and school when they have childcare and eldercare responsibilities. Those are far more visible problems, and tens of millions of people are directly interested in solving them. Similar numbers have direct trouble with lack of medical insurance. In both cases, solving the problems is still tremendously difficult work and it takes a long, long time.

I’m not saying “it’ll never happen”, but I just don’t think that, say, “get cops competent at recognizing and dealing with autism in people they’ve never seen before” is likely to happen in any kind of timeframe that’s useful to people here today. So given that, it makes sense to go for the possible. I don’t think that working on both personal and social goals is impossible, but if you have energy right now for only one, then it seems to me personal is the one to go for.

And though I understand that you could manipulate a niche and use the time of the officer, not everyone can and will do that, and we’re now making choices of us above others. I’m not particularly interested in the police in regards to myself, but I think this is a problem that we as a society needs to address, and I think it is addressable, though not necessarily easy.

Cliff

Police often have a PRish person, and sometimes community outreach, usually related to safety/schools. I’d actually started with this with the idea that the mother would be taking the boy around to police to introduce the boy; I think it’d be a harder thing to do on your own, unless you were willing to commit to some volunteer work.

But going up to police officers where I am (funny enough, I was talking to officers out of my area) would be… difficult. It seems that where you are that is possible and easy, and I’m glad that you’ve had that kind of relationship. But officers, in my experience, usually don’t have the time or energy to do that. They’d virtually need a PR section to add to their regular duties.

Generality protocol, to be honest, in the long run would probably be easier to handle than on an individual basis. Is it even vaguely practical to register one in every twelve person with every restaurant they go to so that when they come on premise that smoking just happens to go away, as opposed to modifying the current system to eliminate smoking in restaurants? I think, honestly, things have to be done in generalities because people can only make time for one person or so, not populations, and we shouldn’t need to balance for those who happen to know the relevant people.

Cliff

Moving is expensive when you’re poor, but it’s much less expensive than it used to be. There’s a lot more information available now, and it’s easier to make connections ahead of time. Easier to find out what places are like, where jobs are, what disability services are available, and what the gap is between advertised services and real services.

Police are violent anywhere when they believe they have to be. The definition of “when is force necessary” varies widely from place to place. So is public response to unnecessary violence.

We had an incident several years ago where a cop accidentally shot a young man who’d gone into his parents shop late at night. The cop was on a hair trigger and went over the edge. The community outcry was overwhelming, I believe the cop was either retired or left voluntarily, the police had to do an investigation and make changes, and a community-volunteer-staffed police oversight board was established. It exists to this day and is taken seriously, and reports annually on police use of force. We don’t have much of it, and what there is tends to be connected to narcotics. Places are not all alike.