Community Trust Can't Be Trained Into Existence

In their recent analysis, Marcus makes a compelling case for the Badges and Bridges model — bringing law enforcement and people with disabilities together in shared space before crisis strikes. The program's community-centered design, built on a genuine friendship between Mack Dawson and Sergeant Kevin Moody, distinguishes it from the PowerPoint-and-certificate approach that dominates most law enforcement training landscapes.

But that distinction raises a harder question than the article poses: what happens when the program ends and the institutional culture doesn't change?

This isn't a critique of Badges and Bridges specifically. It's a structural observation about where disability training programs almost universally stall — and why the disability community's role as architect, rather than participant, determines whether any of it holds.

The Curriculum Problem

Most law enforcement disability training in the United States is designed by non-disabled professionals. Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) programs, which the DOJ has promoted as a best practice (opens in new window) for decades, typically involve mental health clinicians and law enforcement administrators in curriculum development. The people most likely to be on the receiving end of a police encounter — autistic adults, people with psychiatric disabilities, Deaf individuals, those experiencing intellectual or developmental disability — are consulted sporadically if at all.

The ADA's Title II requirements (opens in new window) mandate that public entities, including law enforcement agencies, ensure effective communication and equal access for people with disabilities. But the regulations say nothing about who designs the training meant to operationalize those requirements. That silence is where most programs lose their way.

The ADA National Network (opens in new window) has documented this gap repeatedly in its technical assistance work. Training that treats disability as a category to be managed — rather than a community with expertise about its own needs — tends to reinforce the very deficit-based framing it claims to dismantle.

When Participation Isn't Partnership

There's a meaningful difference between including disabled people in training events and building training from disabled people's knowledge. Badges and Bridges leans closer to genuine partnership than most programs, which is precisely why it's worth examining what that partnership actually requires to be sustained.

Research published through the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (opens in new window) identifies a consistent pattern: training programs that use disabled people as demonstration subjects — showing officers what a meltdown looks like, or how an AAC device works — without embedding those same people in policy and curriculum decisions produce officers who can recognize disability but not respond to it equitably.

Recognition without structural change is its own kind of failure. An officer who can identify that someone is autistic but operates within a department that has no de-escalation protocols, no alternatives to force, and no accountability mechanisms for disability-related misconduct has received training that stops precisely where it matters most.

As explored previously, the statistics from Disability Rights Ohio are stark: 30 to 50 percent of people subjected to police force have disabilities. That figure doesn't shift through awareness alone. It shifts through policy, through enforcement, and through communities having binding input into both.

What the ADA Actually Requires — and Doesn't

Under 28 C.F.R. § 35.130 (opens in new window), public entities are prohibited from administering programs in ways that discriminate on the basis of disability. The DOJ's guidance on law enforcement and the ADA (opens in new window) is explicit that this includes interactions in the field — arrests, detentions, emergency responses.

But compliance frameworks don't require community co-design. They require non-discrimination outcomes. The gap between those two things is enormous, and it's where disability communities consistently lose ground.

The Great Lakes ADA Center (opens in new window) and its regional counterparts provide technical assistance to law enforcement agencies navigating Title II compliance. Their guidance consistently points toward proactive engagement with disability communities — not as a legal mandate, but as the most reliable path to actual compliance rather than paper compliance.

Paper compliance is its own epidemic in this space. Departments can point to completed training hours, signed acknowledgment forms, and updated policy language while their officers continue to respond to mental health crises with the same tools and assumptions they've always used. The DOJ's pattern-or-practice investigations (opens in new window) have found exactly this dynamic in multiple jurisdictions.

The Community Input Infrastructure That's Missing

At Crip Crit, we apply a community-centered lens to accessibility questions precisely because technical compliance and lived equity rarely occupy the same space without intentional design. The Badges and Bridges model gets closer than most because it starts from relationship rather than regulation. But relationship-based programs are fragile in ways that structural accountability mechanisms are not.

What does durable community input actually look like in this context? It means disability-led organizations having seats — not advisory seats, but decision-making seats — on the bodies that develop departmental use-of-force policies. It means departments publishing data on disability-related incidents and making that data accessible to the communities most affected. It means complaint processes that don't require disabled people to navigate the same institutions that harmed them.

Several jurisdictions have begun experimenting with civilian oversight structures that include disability representation. Portland's community oversight work (opens in new window) and Denver's co-responder model, which pairs mental health clinicians with officers, represent partial steps. Neither is sufficient on its own. Both demonstrate that institutional change requires structural redesign, not supplemental programming.

Training as Starting Point, Not Solution

Building on this framework from Marcus, the question isn't whether programs like Badges and Bridges have value — they clearly do, and the relationship-first design philosophy deserves wider adoption. The question is what surrounds them.

Training that exists within a department culture of low accountability, inadequate mental health infrastructure, and limited disability community input will produce individual officers with better awareness and institutional outcomes that don't change. That's not a failure of the training. It's a failure of the ecosystem in which training is asked to do too much work alone.

Disability communities have been naming this dynamic for decades. The tools for structural change exist — in ADA enforcement mechanisms, in DOJ oversight authority, in civilian accountability bodies, and in the policy expertise that disabled advocates have developed through hard experience. The missing variable, consistently, is whether institutions treat that expertise as essential or optional.

It shouldn't take a friendship between a football player and a police sergeant to create the conditions for equitable police-disability encounters. Those conditions should be built into how departments are designed, funded, and held accountable. Relationship-building programs work best when they're accelerating structural change that's already underway — not substituting for it.