Badges and Bridges: When Disability Training Saves Lives

Training programs like Badges and Bridges reveal a hard truth: the most dangerous moment in a police-disability encounter often happens before anyone speaks. The gap isn't malice — it's a missing interpretive framework. And that gap has a body count.

In Maryland alone, three people with disabilities or mental health conditions died in police encounters between March and June 2025. Alexander LaMorie, 25, was shot and killed by Howard County Police in March. Louis Jackson, 46, died in May. Pytorcarcha Brooks, 70, was killed in June during a severe mental health crisis. The circumstances in each case differed substantially. But the pattern they form is not unique to Maryland — and it's not random.

Research from Disability Rights Ohio puts the scale in stark terms: 30% to 50% of people subjected to police force have disabilities, and 33% to 50% of people killed by police have disabilities. These are not marginal figures. They represent a structural failure in how crisis response systems are built — and who bears the cost of that failure.

How Badges and Bridges Works

The program, developed by Baltimore advocate Mack Dawson and Maryland Department of Transportation Police Sergeant Kevin Moody, operates on a deceptively simple premise: bring law enforcement and people with intellectual, developmental, and invisible disabilities together before a crisis happens. Not in a classroom. Not through a PowerPoint. In shared space, on equal footing.

Moody and Dawson met more than a decade ago playing semi-professional football together. That relationship — built on mutual respect across different lived realities — is essentially the model they're trying to replicate at scale. Participants range from age 7 to adulthood. Events have included Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and other regional law enforcement agencies. One gathering during National Night Out this year used horses as a shared focal point before moving into open conversation about the pressures officers face and the vulnerabilities disability communities navigate.

The exchange is bidirectional by design. Officers learn how people with intellectual, developmental, and invisible disabilities may process information and respond to stress. Community members learn why officers are trained to treat certain movements as potential threats. Neither side is positioned as the problem. Both sides are positioned as people who need better tools.

Moody's traffic stop encounter illustrates the stakes clearly. A man refusing to remove his hands from his pockets — a behavior that police training frames as a serious threat signal — turned out to be stimming, a self-regulatory behavior common among autistic individuals. Moody had heard the word "stim" before, but didn't understand what it meant until he'd gone through this kind of training. His response — patting the man down while allowing him to keep his hands in his pockets — de-escalated the encounter without force. That outcome required both knowledge and the presence of mind to apply it under pressure.

The Operational Gap

From an operational standpoint, what Badges and Bridges addresses is a capacity problem in crisis response infrastructure. Disability-competent de-escalation isn't a soft skill — it's a technical one. Officers need to recognize behavioral presentations associated with autism, intellectual disabilities, and invisible disabilities, distinguish them from threat indicators in real time, and have alternative response protocols ready to deploy.

That's a training design challenge as much as it is a cultural one. Most law enforcement training curricula don't allocate meaningful time to disability-specific behavioral literacy. When Moody says "we don't have enough first responders learning how to take care of these dynamic issues," he's describing a gap in institutional capacity — not individual willingness.

Dawson, who identifies as having a "neurodifference" and works as a professional massage therapist, brings the community perspective that makes the program's bidirectional structure work. His presence isn't symbolic. It's functional. Officers need to hear directly from people whose behavior they might otherwise misread. Contact-based learning has a stronger evidence base for reducing bias and improving response than didactic training alone.

The program is housed under Preparing Youth for Tomorrow, Inc. (PYT), an organization Moody founded originally to provide financial literacy mentorship to Baltimore youth. PYT's mission has since expanded to include law enforcement-community connection work — an example of an existing community organization pivoting its operational capacity toward an identified gap rather than building something new from scratch.

Title II Compliance and Legal Obligation

This isn't only a policing story. It's a Title II compliance story. Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (opens in new window) requires public entities — including law enforcement agencies — to provide equal access to their services and programs. That obligation extends to how police interact with people with disabilities in the field. The Department of Justice has addressed this directly (opens in new window), including guidance on the obligation to make reasonable modifications to policies and procedures when interacting with people with disabilities.

The DOJ's ADA requirements for law enforcement (opens in new window) are not aspirational. They are legal obligations. Agencies that fail to train officers adequately on disability-related interactions carry real legal exposure — and more importantly, they fail the people they're obligated to serve equally.

What Badges and Bridges represents, in this frame, is a community-driven attempt to close a compliance gap that formal enforcement mechanisms have not fully addressed. Settlement agreements in civil rights cases — including those involving law enforcement — often produce paper compliance without the institutional capacity changes needed to actually shift outcomes. Training programs that build interpretive capacity at the officer level are doing something settlements frequently don't: changing what happens in the field.

What This Analysis Does Not Establish

This article documents a promising training model and its legal context, but does not establish: (1) whether Badges and Bridges meets all Title II requirements for a given jurisdiction or agency — that requires legal counsel review of your specific policies, training curricula, and field outcomes; (2) whether contact-based training alone satisfies ADA obligations without accompanying policy change, accountability mechanisms, and outcome measurement — those are separate compliance questions; (3) whether this model is equally effective across all disability categories or all officer populations — the evidence base is limited to documented encounters and participant feedback, not controlled comparison; or (4) whether adoption of this model insulates an agency from civil rights liability — that depends on implementation fidelity, documentation, and sustained institutional commitment. Before implementing or scaling this approach, consult with disability rights counsel and your state's ADA Title II coordinator to confirm alignment with your jurisdiction's specific obligations. This article is descriptive, not prescriptive legal guidance.

What Scaling Requires

The Badges and Bridges approach has real promise, but scaling it requires honest assessment of what makes it work. The program's effectiveness depends on:

• Trusted relationships across difference — Moody and Dawson's decade-long friendship is the foundation. That can't be manufactured, but it can be cultivated through sustained community engagement.
• Bidirectional learning design — Programs that only train officers, without giving disability community members insight into officer training and decision-making, miss half the equation.
• Repetition and reinforcement — A single event doesn't build behavioral competency. Agencies need to integrate disability literacy into ongoing training cycles, not treat it as a one-time workshop.
• Community organization infrastructure — PYT provides the institutional home for this work. Replicating the model elsewhere requires identifying or building similar anchor organizations with existing community trust.

For law enforcement agencies evaluating their own capacity, the first question isn't "do we have a training program?" It's "does our training change what officers do in the field when they encounter a person in crisis?" Those are different questions with different answers.

Concrete Next Steps for This Week

If you lead or advise a law enforcement agency, here's what to act on immediately:

Day 1–2: Audit existing training content

• Pull your current disability awareness or de-escalation training curriculum (who owns this: training director or academy commander).
• Document: How many hours are allocated to disability-specific behavioral literacy? What conditions are covered? What field scenarios are taught?
• Action: Create a one-page inventory. If disability content is fewer than 4 hours annually or covers fewer than five specific disability presentations, you have a documented gap.

Day 3–4: Map field outcomes

• Request data from your use-of-force review board or complaint intake: In the past 12 months, how many incidents involved a person with a documented or suspected disability? (Who owns this: your records or compliance officer.)
• Cross-reference with your training records: Were the officers involved in those incidents trained on the disability presentations involved?
• Action: If you cannot answer this question, you cannot measure whether training changes field response. That's your second gap.

Day 5: Identify a community anchor

• Contact your local disability rights organization, autism self-advocacy group, or developmental disabilities council. Ask: "Who in our community has credibility with both disabled people and law enforcement, and would be willing to co-design training?"
• Do not assume this person exists yet. If they don't, ask: "Who should we fund to build that bridge?"
• Action: Schedule a conversation with at least one community leader by end of week. Bring your training audit and field outcome data.

Optional: Engage external review

• If your agency is serious about compliance and field-level change, consider whether an accessibility assessment of your training design and policy framework would clarify your obligations and readiness. Luke can help structure that review.

The Human Cost and the Path Forward

The people who died in Maryland this year deserved to survive their encounters with police. Building the systems that make survival more likely — for disabled community members and for officers — is both a legal obligation and a human one.

Badges and Bridges demonstrates that the gap between those two outcomes is bridgeable. The question is whether agencies have the will to build the bridge at scale. For departments considering this work: start by auditing what your current training actually teaches officers about disability-related behavior. Then ask whether that training changes field response. If the answer is no, you have both a compliance gap and a human rights gap. The Moody-Dawson model shows one path to closing both.