Restorative Policing, Conferencing and Community

Source: (2003) Police Practice and Research: An International Journal. 4(4): 411-427.

This paper describes the experience of a police department with the restorative conferencing process in a fast growing urban/suburban city. We describe how conferencing changed the focus of the police response to juvenile offenders and offered an alternative to court and formal processing that allowed a high proportion of moderate to serious offenders to be supervised in the community as a diversion option. In particular, conferencing became a police tool for increasing community participation in youth crime decision making and a technique for successfully building community capacity to resolve conflict and repair harm without recourse to adversarial intervention. (author’s abstract).