Good Training Isn't Enough: The Structural Gaps Behind Police-Disability Encounters

Programs like Badges and Bridges represent something real: genuine relationship-building between law enforcement and disability communities, grounded in mutual respect rather than liability management. That matters. The evidence that personal familiarity changes officer behavior is credible, and the program's design—shared space, equal footing, no PowerPoint—reflects an understanding of how adults actually learn.

But after 15 years covering accessibility and disability rights, I've watched enough promising initiatives cycle through the news and then quietly disappear to ask the harder question: what happens when the program ends, the funding lapses, or the champion retires?

The answer, historically, is that structural conditions reassert themselves. And those structural conditions are what training alone cannot fix.

The Policy Floor That Isn't Holding

Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act has required law enforcement agencies to provide equal access to services—including crisis response—since 1992. The DOJ's enforcement guidance on Title II (opens in new window) makes explicit that agencies must make reasonable modifications to policies and practices when interacting with people with disabilities. This isn't aspirational language. It's a legal mandate with teeth.

Yet the DOJ's own pattern-or-practice investigations (opens in new window) repeatedly find that agencies with years of ADA obligations on the books still lack written protocols for disability encounters. The gap between legal requirement and operational reality is not primarily a training gap. It's an accountability gap.

The 2024 final rule updating Title II's accessibility requirements (opens in new window)—which extended digital accessibility mandates to state and local governments—signals that DOJ is serious about enforcement modernization. But disability-competent crisis response remains largely outside structured federal oversight mechanisms, left to the discretion of individual departments and the energy of individual advocates.

Marcus's analysis of Badges and Bridges correctly identifies that the most dangerous moment in a police-disability encounter often happens before anyone speaks. What it doesn't fully interrogate is why that interpretive gap persists across decades of ADA enforcement, multiple waves of crisis intervention training, and hundreds of community-police dialogue programs.

What Research Shows About Training Efficacy

The statistics from Disability Rights Ohio—that 30% to 50% of people subjected to police force have disabilities, and 33% to 50% of people killed by police have disabilities—are damning. They're also not new. Researchers have documented this disproportion for more than two decades.

During that same period, Crisis Intervention Team training has expanded dramatically. CIT programs, modeled on the Memphis Model developed in 1988 (opens in new window), now exist in hundreds of jurisdictions. The evidence on their effectiveness is genuinely mixed. A systematic review published in Psychiatric Services (opens in new window) found that CIT training improved officer knowledge and attitudes—but showed limited evidence of reducing use of force or improving outcomes for people in crisis.

This doesn't mean training is worthless. It means training is insufficient as a standalone intervention. The research consistently points toward a more complex picture: training effects decay without reinforcement, supervisory culture often overrides individual officer preparation, and dispatch protocols frequently undermine de-escalation before an officer arrives on scene.

From our evidence-based analytical approach, the question isn't whether Badges and Bridges produces meaningful change in participants—it almost certainly does. The question is whether participant-level change translates to system-level outcomes without accompanying policy mandates.

The Volunteer Problem

Badges and Bridges works, in part, because it's voluntary on both sides. Officers who show up want to be there. Community members who attend have chosen engagement. This self-selection is a feature for building authentic relationships and a significant limitation for systemic impact.

The officers most likely to harm someone in a disability encounter are not attending community bridge-building events on their days off. The departments with the most entrenched use-of-force cultures are not typically the ones sending representatives to collaborative programs.

This is the implementation reality that sits beneath the inspiring stories: voluntary programs concentrate benefit among the already-willing. Reaching the rest requires something more coercive—mandatory training standards, enforceable policy requirements, and consequences for non-compliance.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (opens in new window) established that accessibility compliance for federal agencies requires both standards and enforcement mechanisms. The same logic applies to disability-competent crisis response. Standards without enforcement produce compliance theater. Relationships without policy produce islands of good practice surrounded by unchanged systems.

Accessibility practitioners who follow our analytical framework will recognize this pattern from digital accessibility work: organizations that treat accessibility as a values exercise rather than a compliance requirement consistently underperform those with structured accountability—regardless of how genuine their commitment appears.

What Balance Actually Requires

A balanced analysis of police-disability encounters doesn't mean splitting the difference between community programs and structural reform. It means accurately accounting for what each intervention can and cannot do.

Community programs like Badges and Bridges build social capital, create personal relationships that can interrupt individual escalations, and generate political will for deeper reform. These are genuine contributions that shouldn't be dismissed because they don't solve everything.

But as Marcus's original reporting documents, three people with disabilities died in Maryland police encounters in a single three-month period in 2025. That pace of harm cannot be addressed through programs that reach willing participants on a voluntary basis.

The ADA National Network (opens in new window), through its regional centers, has consistently argued that durable change in law enforcement practice requires three elements working together: training that builds genuine competency, written policies that encode that competency into institutional practice, and accountability mechanisms that create consequences for deviation. Remove any one element and the system reverts.

The advocates behind Badges and Bridges understand this. Mack Dawson and Sergeant Kevin Moody are building relationships precisely because they know relationships create the political conditions for policy change. The program isn't naïve about its own limitations—it's playing a long game.

The risk is that funders, policymakers, and journalists treat the relationship-building as the destination rather than the foundation. When a program produces compelling stories and visible community goodwill, there's institutional pressure to declare progress and move on. The body count in Maryland suggests we cannot afford that misreading.

Goodwill is where structural change starts. It is not where it ends.