Understanding the UK Police Caution: Autism, Comprehension, and Legal Rights

This project examines a deceptively simple question with serious implications: Do autistic adults fully understand the UK Police Caution when it is delivered during an arrest?

Although autistic people are no more likely to offend, they are disproportionately drawn into police contact — and once there, they face a system that often fails to recognise or accommodate their communication and processing needs. The police caution is a critical moment in this process. It is long, syntactically complex, and delivered verbally at speed, yet it underpins a person’s right to silence and the legal consequences of what they say next.

This study is the first to directly test how autistic and non-autistic adults comprehend the caution, using a series of applied tasks that go beyond surface recall. It compares understanding under different delivery formats, such as verbal versus written presentation, and full versus sentence-by-sentence delivery. Early findings highlight clear group differences in applied comprehension and reveal that small, intuitive changes to delivery may not be enough to bridge the gap.

This work contributes to national conversations around policing, neurodiversity, and legal safeguarding, providing an evidence base to rethink how rights information is communicated to autistic people during high-stress encounters. It also aligns closely with COALESCE’s wider mission: bringing psychological science, cognitive profiling, and lived experience into real-world systems that urgently need reform.