Being Innocent Is Not Always Enough (2024)

Autistic adults are no different from lots of other people in the community in that they occasionally may find themselves in a situation where the police wish to question them about a crime that has occurred. Perhaps they were known to be present at the scene of the crime or an acquaintance of someone suspected of being involved in the crime.

Whatever the reason for attracting the interest of police investigators, they may be one of the early suspects and, consequently, their initial interactions with the police are likely to determine whether they remain under suspicion.

When a police officer erroneously suspects a particular person of committing or being an accomplice in a crime, there is an obvious conflict between the officer’s beliefs about the person’s involvement in the crime and what the suspect knows to be the case. There are many ways in which such a conflict may be resolved, perhaps via information provided by witnesses, the emergence of exonerating physical evidence or the availability of alibi evidence. However, in many circumstances, a successful resolution will involve the suspect recognizing that there is a conflict of perspectives, putting themselves in the position of the police officer and thinking through what is required to allay that officer’s suspicion. In other words, the suspect needs to provide the sort of relevant information that is likely to allay the officers’ concerns.

Of course, to act in this way requires that the suspect has the ability to take the perspective of the police officer. The suspect needs to be able to anticipate what the officer may be thinking, what their intentions are, where the interaction might be heading and so forth. This ability to take the perspective of another person during an interaction is sometimes referred to as theory of mind. And, it is generally recognized that theory of mind deficits characterize many autistic individuals.

One widely reported case illustrates how such a deficit may influence the course of an autistic person’s interaction with the police. Connor Liebel, an autistic youth, was observed by a police officer observed repetitively flicking a piece of string in front of his face (i.e., self-stimulating). Thinking that Connor was affected by drugs, the officer asked what he was doing and why he was bouncing around. When Connor replied that he was stimming and then just walked away from the officer—without apparently taking the perspective of the officer and explaining why he had been behaving thus—the officer arrested him in an ensuing violent altercation.

My colleague, Robyn Young, came up with a clever paradigm to investigate this issue systematically. The key measure was called an extrication task, which involved autistic and neuro-typical participants listening to an array of different scenarios, involving different crime situations, in which they took the role of a person suspected of committing a crime. Subsequently, they were asked to provide as much information as possible that would demonstrate to the police officer that they couldn’t have been involved. Some of the other important measures completed by participants tapped theory of mind (i.e., perspective taking) and verbal ability.

The results were extremely promising. Not surprisingly, given our understanding of some of the characteristics of autism, the autistic adults performed worse on the independent measure of perspective-taking. They also performed worse on the extrication task. Most importantly, however, after controlling for verbal IQ, perspective-taking ability (or theory of mind) turned out to be an important predictor of the participants’ ability to extricate themselves from suspicion of criminal involvement.

The findings from this study, which appear in a forthcoming article authored by Robyn Young and me in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, illustrate how ASD individuals may, despite being innocent, find themselves as suspects and have great difficulty persuading police, and perhaps judges and jurors, of their innocence.

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Clearly the research paradigm used in the study I have just described differs in a number of ways from the real-life situation where an innocent person finds themselves under suspicion and is dealing with a real police officer—so it is possible, of course, that the results may not generalize to such situations. But the results are sufficiently promising that we are developing further studies using methodologies that more closely parallel real-world circumstances.

Should future research demonstrate that our initial findings generalize to more naturalistic contexts, potentially important sources of bias that may undermine autistic individuals’ interactions with the justice system will be highlighted. Such knowledge will, of course, be crucial for helping criminal justice system professionals understand how some of the characteristic features of autistic individuals may shape any interactions they have with the justice system.

References

Young, R. L., & Brewer, N. (in press, 2020). Brief report: Perspective taking deficits, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and allaying police officers’ suspicions about criminal involvement. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Being Innocent Is Not Always Enough (2024)

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