RESTORATIVE JUSTICE AND COMMUNITY POLICING

Restorative Justice And Community Policing

Restorative justice and community policing

Introduction

The inclusion of victims as active parties is a primary aim of many restorative schemes, although it is difficult to achieve in practice. Hence there is disagreement over what it means to participate, with some arguing that participation can be indirect - through a mediator, for example, or through a representative at a meeting. Restorative processes should hold offenders accountable by requiring them to explain how they think their actions might have affected others. Through dialogue it is hoped that victims' feelings of anger or fear towards 'their' offender, or crime more generally, will be alleviated, and that offenders will experience genuine remorse and develop a greater sense of victim empathy (Braithwaite, 2009, 65).

Discussion and Analysis

Restorative justice in English policing has its roots in the renowned 'effective cautioning' scheme that began in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia and aimed to caution juvenile offenders according to restorative principles. The Wagga Wagga model's main influences were the New Zealand system of family group conferences and the criminological theory of 'reintegrative shaming' (Johnstone, 2007, 58). The latter argues that the best way to control crime is to induce a sense of shame in offenders for their actions while maintaining respect for them as people (to condemn them as bad people might push them towards deviant identities, commitments or subcultures). It further posits that this kind of reintegrative shaming is best achieved by exposing offenders to the emotionally charged opinions of those whom they most care about, such as parents, partners and friends.

While most Australian jurisdictions ultimately rejected police facilitation in favour of community mediators (the New Zealand conferencing model), other jurisdictions, particularly in the UK and the USA, that subsequently adopted restorative cautioning have tended to use the Wagga Wagga police-led scripted model. Most English police forces introduced restorative justice into their cautioning processes and, following the establishment of youth offending teams, more broadly into their youth justice processes, under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999. More recently still, the conditional caution includes reparative or restorative conditions stipulated by the police and approved by the Crown Prosecution Service.

Police cautioning before the advent of restorative justice had remarkably little legislative intervention or oversight. There was little training, supervision or expectation of consistency for the police who delivered cautions, and empirical research suggests that they were often short and perfunctory, but could also be demeaning and punitive. This changed with restorative justice, which brought with it a full training programme, covering not just how to deliver a caution following a detailed script but also the theoretical justifications for each question and statement included in that script. An accreditation scheme and a number of high-profile academic evaluations of existing schemes followed. This research suggests that a transformation of cautioning practices has been effected that is remarkable in its scope and intensity and that includes a commitment to broader community involvement, procedural fairness and ...