By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor

HELENA – In August 2024, Tyron McAlpin encountered a pair of police officers in Phoenix, Arizona. That meeting quickly took a turn for the worse simply because of the way McAlpin attempted to speak to the officers.

McAlpin is deaf and has cerebral palsy, meaning he could not respond to officers’ verbal commands. When he tried to use sign language to communicate with the officers, body camera video showed that he was immediately grabbed, punched and Tased before being charged with resisting arrest in addition to false felony aggravated assault charges made by a white bystander to the Black McAlpin. Only when he was questioned did he get a chance to reveal his preexisting conditions.

Those charges were dropped after the case received national attention, including from former Helena Police Department chief Brad Flynn.

“This is why I dedicate myself to sensory awareness,” Flynn said in a text attached to a news report of the incident. “To keep this from happening again.”

Flynn and the Helena PD are spearheading a nationwide movement to raise awareness of sensory needs and disorders among law enforcement officers, speaking on and promoting specialized training for how officers should interact with those who exhibit such needs.

Now, such training is standardized and mandated across the state of Alabama, and Flynn’s goal is to expand it even more across the region and country.

Because for him, it’s personal.

Close to home

Flynn’s 13-year-old son Colin was diagnosed with Trisomy 5, a rare disorder that is very similar to autism and causes him to exhibit similar mannerisms and physical cues as those who have autism.

Because of his son’s diagnosis, Flynn has sought ways to make the world a better place for him.

“One of the things I like to say is that when you’re the parent of a special needs child, that in addition to just loving them and getting them through their day, you will to find a way to make their life better and change the world that they’re going to grow up in,” Flynn said.

He got a chance to change the status quo when he was approached by KultureCity, a Birmingham-based nonprofit which provides tools and training for organizations to accommodate those with sensory needs.

KultureCity originally got its start training large public venues to recognize behaviors from people with invisible disabilities and accommodate them by allowing them to bring certain objects like iPads for communication and provide resources at the venue to assist them.

KultureCity was brought on board by police in Salt Lake City, Utah after another high-profile incident in 2020 where an officer shot and seriously injured a 13-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome experiencing a moment of crisis. The organization was tasked with retraining officers on how to interact with those with sensory needs, particularly through de-escalation.

Shortly after, KultureCity reached out to Flynn about being the first police department in the state to be certified in sensory awareness and inclusion.

“We knew chief Brad Flynn through mutual connections and when we started having conversations on, ‘How do we provide first responders with a training that’s going to be helpful, that’s going to support them,’ he came first in mind,” KultureCity’s Uma Srivastava said. “He and his team are really able to help us out, build out scenarios and implement the training and then continuously being an advocate for us.”

In 2021, Helena PD officially partnered with KultureCity, making it just the second department nationwide to do so after Salt Lake City, and Flynn currently volunteers as the organization’s law enforcement liaison.

Under Flynn’s leadership, an Alabama city with a population of 22,117 has led the national charge in growing the ranks of certified police departments and modeling what sensory acceptance and inclusion should look like.

“Salt Lake City was No. 1, Helena is No. 2, and I’m OK with that,” Flynn said. “We in Helena have set the standard thanks to the support of our mayor and city council that the rest of the world follows.”

Back to the academy

Flynn said that sensory training is so important because those with sensory needs sometimes exhibit behaviors that officers could wrongly assume are attributed to something else.

For example, someone who is acting erratically in public could be under the influence of alcohol or drugs, but they could also have a condition like autism that causes them to act in such a way.

Another example Flynn gave was with someone not responding to an officer’s commands to turn around and put your hands behind your back. That could come from an unwillingness to comply or it could instead stem from a person who is non-verbal.

Those situations would normally provoke an officer to escalate the situation. For those with sensory needs, that’s the last thing you do.

“As police officers, we’re trained by the academy to maintain control of the situation,” Flynn said. “And when someone is verbally or physically non-compliant, we escalate. With an individual with sensory needs, once you do that, you’re pouring gas on the fire. It makes things worse.”

To combat such misunderstandings, KultureCity provides crisis intervention training (CIT). The training is centered on deescalating a moment of crisis for an individual by doing things like turning off police car lights for those with sensitivities to light, not calling in a diesel-fueled fire engine for someone with a sensitivity to smell or avoiding escalating the crisis by sending someone to the hospital for something that is completely normal for them to experience.

The training also helps officers learn behaviors like stemming, where individuals with sensory needs run objects through their fingers to help calm them down. For Flynn’s son Colin, his stemmer is a curtain, but it could be a different object depending on the person, such as a string, rope or fidget spinner.

More than anything though, the goal of the training is for officers to be compassionate to a group that Flynn calls one of the most vulnerable populations, giving them the care they need and avoiding more high-profile incidents of police brutality.

“That’s what we’re trying to prevent is because we’ve seen nationwide of, especially over the last five to 10 years, an exponential increase in negative use of force and unnecessary use of force by law enforcement against these individuals because they just didn’t know,” Flynn said. “And this is where what you don’t know can hurt something, can hurt an individual.”

KultureCity’s CIT course is fully online and lasts just over an hour. As the organization’s law enforcement liaison, Flynn speaks around the country about the need for sensory awareness training and to show the results that Helena has seen since training its officers. In certain instances, he even leads the training, as he did in October 2024 for the University of Kentucky Police Department.

The hope is to make it as easy as possible for officers to take the training and implement the lessons into their daily lives.

“This is not a training that we want the officers to dread or not want to go to,” Flynn said. “When they leave this training, which is basically a little over an hour, we’re going to give them all the tools they need in a little over an hour and they can go out and positively impact the world for so many people. And why would you not want to be a part of that?”

Going the extra mile

However, Helena has done more than simply mandate the training for law enforcement and call it a day. Flynn and the police department have led the way for the entire city to become more accepting of those with sensory needs.

After becoming the second department behind Salt Lake City to mandate the training for police officers, Helena was the first to require an annual CIT course for all city employees, from the Helena Fire Department to EMS to Helena Parks and Recreation and beyond.

Helena was also the first to put KultureCity’s sensory bags throughout the city. The bags contain noise-canceling headphones, non-verbal communication cards, fidget spinners and other tools to help individuals destress and communicate with those around them. Every police car and fire truck has a sensory bag in addition to buildings throughout the city.

The police department then went a step further in 2022 and purchased a sensory trailer which contains all the features of KultureCity’s sensory rooms that are installed in large venues like Protective Stadium and Legacy Arena in Birmingham and State Farm Arena in Atlanta.

The trailer is designed to calm those with sensory needs with heavy insulation, LED lighting, bubble lamps, bean bags and textured and carpeted walls. Helena was the first city to purchase one and now brings it to major events like Helena High School football games and Old Town Live.

“We have all types of things in there to help these individuals calm down, get away from the excitement, get away from the people, and get back to where they want to be so they can go back and return to whatever event that we’re at,” Flynn said.

Flynn has also helped make other cities outside Helena more sensory inclusive. Through his work with Alabama representative Leah Hulsey, they have passed a state law that mandates all fire, EMS and police departments in Alabama to take a CIT course.

For Flynn, the law’s passage marked a watershed moment in his advocacy journey as his search to make the world a more accepting place for his son has now led to meaningful change to how first responders are trained in the state of Alabama.

“That’s something that I’m the most proud of, because that ensures that anyone that my son may encounter in his life moving forward is going to have that additional training and is going to say, ‘My son’s not drunk. My son’s not on drugs. He’s not acting erratically. This is how he acts all the time,’” Flynn said. “And they’re going to be able to recognize that and go, ‘OK, let’s stand down. Let’s deescalate here. This is not something that we need to be necessarily warriors and defenders of. We need to be compassionate responders and get this individual to where they need to be.’ And that is so much better than obviously loading them in an ambulance or putting them in the back of a police car because of a false assumption based on your lack of education when it comes to sensory awareness.”

Change in action

Shortly after Helena started offering CIT for officers, school resource officer Blayne Browning encountered a situation where he had to put it in practice.

While on patrol, Browning received a call about a car sitting idle in the middle of the road on the corner of Highways 58 and 17 in Helena. Upon responding to the scene, the driver was listening to incredibly loud music that drowned out both of them when they tried to speak.

After talking him into turning down the music, the driver told Browning he was very upset and had a lot going on in his life at the moment. While talking to him, Browning realized that the driver likely had a mental condition and was concerned that he would drive off and hurt himself.

That led Browning to simply lend an attentive ear to the driver on what was going on in his life.

“I just wanted to talk to him, just kind of get an understanding, try not to agree with him too much because I don’t know what other people are going through and I might not be going through what they are,” Browning said.

Browning got the driver’s wife on the phone and had the fire department come and evaluate him as well. While the driver was adamant about not going to the hospital, Browning eventually talked him into going to get evaluated while giving him additional resources.

He also gave him one resource that he had never given away before: his personal phone number, which the driver requested. Browning obliged with his request and told him that he could call him at any time and help as long as he wanted the help.

The driver ended up getting the help he needed, and his wife even thanked Browning for his actions that day.

“I know his wife praised to the department with what was done that day and said they’ve had terrible interactions before with other police departments and they said a while back, he had a firearm pointed by police at him in another city,” Browning said. “They were very grateful of what I was able to do that day, and I take pride in what I did.”

The incident ended completely contrary to how McAlpin’s encounter with police did in Phoenix–with a positive outcome and the driver receiving the help and support he needed.

It’s an example of how CIT is helping raise sensory awareness and acceptance throughout the country and especially in Helena.

“I’ve been in this for close to 10 years now, and the progression of no training at all and not really recognizing people who have sensory overloads or sensory problems or even some mental states, PTSD and so on, you don’t realize it until you actually attend these classes and KultureCity,” Browning said. “It’s a mandated thing now through the state and so knowing that that’s happening and taking these classes, you don’t know what people are actually going through until you take these classes, and I think it’s crucial that we start doing this more and more, and I think there should be more programs or even more hours required for the state of what’s being required now.”

For Flynn, it’s a sign that what he is doing matters. What started as a personal crusade is now impacting lives across the country, and in turn, making the world a more accepting place for Colin and others like him to live in.

“There’s no doubt at some point in his life, my son is going to come in contact with law enforcement. And I’m not going to be there, or his mother’s not going to be there,” Flynn said. “I want that to be a positive encounter and I want him to be treated with the same respect that any other individual would, and them recognize that he’s one of our most vulnerable citizens and they want to help him get where wherever he needs to go.”