Beyond the Behavior: Responding to Neurodivergence and Mental Health Conditions

Officers contact people with autism, ADHD, psychosis, PTSD, dementia, and brain injury on every shift and on every type of call. Without training, limited eye contact, repetition, flat affect, a delayed answer, or sudden movement gets read as defiance, deception, intoxication, or refusal, and a contact that could have been resolved becomes harder, riskier, and harder to defend in a report.

Beyond the Behavior gives your personnel a repeatable response model for those contacts. Participants learn to recognize when a standard response will not work, adjust the method without lowering safety or investigative standards, document what they observe instead of what they assume, and connect people to the right resources before clearing the scene.

This four-hour live class is taught by Kimberly Simeroth, a Victim Advocate with the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office whose public safety career began in a county jail. It combines instruction, guided discussion, and a scenario lab in which small groups apply the model to realistic calls under time and information constraints. Contacts with victims and witnesses are one important application, alongside every other type of encounter.

What You Will Learn

• Recognize how autism, ADHD, psychosis, PTSD, dementia, and brain injury change how people communicate and respond to officers.

• Apply the OBSERVE, SLOW DOWN, ADAPT, CLARIFY, CONNECT field model on first contact with any person.

• Separate inability from unwillingness before labeling behavior as refusal, deception, intoxication, defiance, or noncompliance.

• Adjust the method without lowering safety or investigative standards: one question at a time, concrete language, less stimulation.

• Reduce sensory overload at the scene by limiting speakers, lights, noise, and unnecessary touch when safety permits.

• Respond to hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia without arguing or affirming them, while keeping attention on observable facts.

• Assess possible head injury, strangulation effects, and medical red flags that people may not recognize or report themselves.

• Replace labels like “evasive,” “hysterical,” and “refused to cooperate” with objective documentation of observed behavior and context.

• Interview victims and witnesses without judging credibility by presentation, and corroborate with video, dispatch, records, and witnesses.

• Connect people to advocates, crisis, medical, and disability resources through a warm handoff before clearing the scene.

Who Should Attend Patrol officers and deputies, investigators, field training officers and sergeants, dispatchers who take the first call, school resource officers, victim advocates, and allied public safety professionals. People with neurodivergent, mental health, cognitive, and trauma-related conditions are contacted on every type of call, and a misread contact can escalate an encounter, weaken a report or case, or draw a complaint. This class gives supervisors a response model they can put into policy and field training, and it gives officers, dispatchers, and advocates a shared process from the first call through the handoff.

Your Instructor Kimberly Simeroth is a Victim Advocate with the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office, where she has served victims in Special Victims Unit and Homicide cases within Criminal Investigation Services since February 2021. Her public safety career began in corrections: more than twelve years as a deputy in the Montgomery County Jail, also serving as Deputy Records Manager, followed by nearly three years as a Probation and Parole Officer with the Florida Department of Corrections and a year as an extradition officer. That background gives her direct experience with the custody, supervision, investigative, and victim-services sides of the system, and it shapes how she teaches officers to approach people whose behavior does not fit the standard script. She holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Criminology from Old Dominion University and an Associate degree in Police Science from New River Community College. Kimberly is TFUSA’s victim advocacy instructor.

Register now to give your personnel a defensible response model before the next contact that does not fit the standard script.

Cost $224 per person.

Payment Options Credit card online, purchase order, or check. Invoice will be generated prior to class but is not due before. Checks payable to Training Force USA, 7769 McClure Drive, Tallahassee, FL 32312.

Cancellations and Substitutions Registrations are confirmed upon submission and participants are responsible for payment regardless of attendance. Substitutions are welcome at any time by phone, email, or online. If minimum enrollment is not met, the class will transition to an on-demand format and all registered participants will be notified. A full refund is also available.

Questions Phone: 850-556-4544 | Email: contactus@trainingforceusa.com | www.trainingforceusa.com