TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A chance meeting between two fathers at a playground has grown into a new effort aimed at making encounters between first responders and people with autism safer and more informed.<\/p>\n
One afternoon, Deputy Chief Jeff Mahoney was pushing his nonverbal autistic son on a swing when he met another father doing the same thing. Their conversation turned into a shared commitment to improving how first responders interact with individuals with autism.<\/p>\n
That vision became reality Thursday with the launch of the Approach with Care Autism Awareness Initiative, backed by Chief Revell.<\/p>\n
As part of the community partnership, families and autistic adults can receive a free Approach with Care vehicle decal. The decal is designed to discreetly alert first responders that someone inside the vehicle may have autism, providing context before an interaction begins.<\/p>\n
Organizers say the initiative is intended to go beyond the decal, focusing on awareness, education and partnership so that interactions start with understanding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A chance meeting between two fathers at a playground has grown into a new effort…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349762,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[232,234,233],"class_list":["post-349761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee-headlines","tag-tallahassee-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}