Prevalence of disabled people involved in Spanish Civil Guard's police activity.
Most police contact with disabled people in Spain is help, not crime—so teach clients to see officers as allies.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Spanish Civil Guards wrote reports every time they helped a person with a disability.
Researchers read 2 099 of these reports from one year.
They counted how many were crimes and how many were rescues or aid.
What they found
Only 20 % of the calls were about crimes.
Four out of five calls were to help or rescue someone.
Most police contact was support, not arrest.
How this fits with other research
Foley et al. (2018) saw the same trend in Australian doctor visits.
Autistic youth now see GPs more often for psychosocial help than for sickness.
Both studies show disabled people use public services for help, not trouble.
Lord et al. (1997) found that non-verbal clients have more behavior problems.
That could explain why some calls start as aid yet still need police presence.
Why it matters
When you teach safety skills, stress that police are helpers.
Role-play asking police for help instead of running away.
Share these numbers with school teams so they write safety plans that assume cooperation, not confrontation.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Improving interventions with victims and offenders with disabilities requires analysis of the degree of prevalence of crimes in which these people are involved. For this purpose, data regarding interventions made by the Spanish Civil Guard between 2008 and 2010, in which 2099 people had some kind of disability, have been collected and analyzed, with particular regard to criminal offenses (felonies and/or misdemeanors). In this study, the relationship between the types of disability a person has and other variables like their connection to the incident, their gender, age, the relationship between victim and perpetrator, and the time and place of the events were all taken into consideration. The results show that most of the victims with disabilities served by the Spanish Civil Guard were male. The interventions were mainly aid and rescues. Criminal offenses were only 20% of the events.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.08.003