Life with Aspergers

Earlier this week in Sydney, our police fatally shot a woman who was wielding a knife . It later transpired that she had Asperger's syndrome. I didn't comment on it at the time as I was quite busy at work -- and I was also awaiting the backlash of comments to the effect that;  "the police could have shot her in the leg or tasered or tackled her rather than shooting to kill, therefore ALL police are bad" or  "all people with Asperger's syndrome can become knife wielding maniacs" To my surprise and delight, those responses weren't forthcoming.   Instead our media mainly discussed the difficulties that police face in situations like this and the problems that people with Asperger's syndrome have when it comes to understanding police direction. It was a very mature response from our media. I'm not going to go over things here because I didn't know Courtney, suffice to say that my heart goes out to  Courtney Topic's family . ...

Over the last few weeks, I've read several blogs where aspies have described their interactions with the law. In every case, the incidents were blown out of proportion by the tactics of the police and the social difficulties experienced by the aspie. I too have had difficulties with the police (and other aspects of the law). Misunderstandings My first major police incident was as a teen being pulled over for speeding. At the time, I had an old car which took forever to warm up and I really knew very little about cars. The car was misbehaving and I thought that maybe it needed to warm up (in actual fact, it was overheating due to a burst water filter). I tried going fast to warm it up - and that was when the police turned up behind me. I told the police that there was something wrong with the car and they just laughed and said "yeah, what? the brakes?". Luckily I knew to just keep quiet otherwise I'm sure they'd have tried to take things further. Following the W...