By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Wednesday, March 25, 1992
The Record (New Jersey) | 3 Star | NORTHWEST BERGEN YOUR TOWN RECORD | 12
A patrol officer stopped an 80-year-old woman driving 5 mph on the highway, then wondered what to do when she told him she was driving so slowly because she was hungry and needed to find a place to get a slice of pizza.
“What is the captain going to say? What is the judge going to say?” John Pescatore, director of the Bergen County Highway Safety Office, said in recalling an incident early in his 25 years as a law-enforcement officer.
To avoid citing the woman for driving too slowly, then having to answer to his captain or a judge, Pescatore said he would have delivered pizza to the woman’s house every day of his career.
“Our primary responsibility is no longer just enforcing the law, but to assist the people in our community to live a safer life,” he said.
Pescatore spoke about the incident to about 55 police officers attending a training program last week on older-adult behavior.
The half-day session, sponsored by the northern New Jersey chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association and Hackensack Medical Center’s Geriatric Assessment Program, looked at ways police should handle older adults, who appear to be committing crimes but may in fact be confused or suffering dementia.
Police officers often notice confusion and dementia in an older adult before family members do, Janet Reynolds of the Geriatric Assessment Program said. The center is an outpatient program for families and other health-care professionals on how to keep older adults healthy and independent.
“There are many reasons why an older adult can be confused,” Reynolds said. “They include everything from Alzheimer’s disease, to reaction to medication, to depression from being alone and isolated.”
Bergen County was selected as the first place to hold the police training seminar, because it has the state’s largest population of adults over 60 years old about 174,000 said Marcia F. Mohl, executive director of the Northern New Jersey Alzheimer’s Association. The chance that a person will get Alzheimer’s, a progressive degenerative brain disease that often results in irreversible dementia, increases with age.
It also often results in a loss of memory, erratic driving, fear, and confusion. About 150,000 New Jersey residents have Alzheimer’s, Mohl said.
Because victims of Alzheimer’s might sometime lash out in frustration at their loved ones, Englewood Police Detective Barry Johnson pointed out that the state’s new Domestic Violence Prevention Act mandates police make an arrest when they see evidence of abuse.
Reynolds of the Geriatric Assessment Program advised that it may be better to leave the person in that situation because, often, they would have forgotten what they did before police arrived at the scene. Arresting them might only increase their confusion, she said. But officers told her the mandate of the law does not leave them room for discretion.
Both Rochelle Park Police Chief William Betten and Hackensack Sgt. John Elefante said the seminar was useful, if only to amplify the care officers need to use in certain situations.
Rochelle Park, with a nursing home and a huge residential development for the elderly, has Bergen County’s largest percentage of adults over 60, Betten said. “Police, sometimes, are the only friends and contact some elderly people who live alone have,” he said.
ID: 17372311 | Copyright © 1992, The Record (New Jersey)
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