The rise and fall of RCMP community justice forums: restorative justice and public safety interoperability in Canada.

• Author: Deukmedjian, John Edward
• Position: Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Restorative justice programs have proliferated in Canada over the past three decades. During the 1990s, the emphasis and development of restorative justice perhaps reached its summit when both the federal government and the RCMP outwardly problematized conventional justice on the one hand, while they "championed" (1) restorative justice on the other. At the time, the RCMP emphasized the national development of family group conferences or community justice forums (CJFs). Since 2002, both the RCMP and federal government have quieted their promotion. This paper explores this discursive history of present-day RCMP policy and practice on restorative justice in Canada.

This exploration is motivated by a simple observation: while restorative justice's cause celebre (exemplified through the supportive literature) continues to justify expansion in its application, and while criticisms of such expansion have also developed, neither adequately explains the rising popularity of restorative justice for RCMP executives and the federal government, or their subsequent deprioritization of restorative programming. There is a deficiency in the analyses of institutional and governmental conditions (of possibility and alignment) allowing or limiting the currency of specific restorative programs. This paper does hot aim to provide an all-encompassing genealogy of restorative justice in Canada. Instead, this paper delves into the specific institutional and governmental development of RCMP CJFs--as a police-community consultative program that closely aligned (2) with the RCMP's and federal government's community-policing strategy. The CJF promised a structured way in which the police could address crime through community consultation. The subsequent de-prioritization of CJFs followed from the RCMP's adoption of integrated (intelligence-led) policing and the government's concomitant strategic shift to public safety interoperability.

Quite simply, instead of addressing crime through community consultation, the new strategy does so through inter-agency risk management. As the CJF framework did not obviously align with this national and global trend, the RCMP and federal government eliminated the program's national funding and promotion. This paper thus situates its exploration of the rise of CJFs in policy discourse as an outcome of the program's apparent alignment with community policing. Moreover, the subsequent fall of CJFs is well explained as an outcome of the lack of discourse that suggested any obvious strategic alignment with the integrated and intelligence-led model.

This change raises the question of what the current role of restorative justice ought to be in Canada. This paper argues that, while minimal, the trend may be the integration of restorative justice as a multi-agency forum for managing risks within an emergent public safety network. Hence, this paper explores how restorative justice programming is re-justified within public safety auspices while alternatively exploring the possibility of its mobilization by local actors outside criminal justice for engendering community peacemaking. The conclusion discusses potential benefits and limits of these possibilities. It also presents general theoretical observations on the role of alignment in governmental programming.

Restorative justice, community policing, and the Chicago school: Theory and context

Two developments in the late 1980s have significantly influenced Canadian policy on restorative justice. New Zealand enacted the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act, which injected the Maori tradition of family group conferences in that country's system of criminal justice. Moreover, John Braithwaite published his seminal Crime, Shame and Reintegration, which remains a significant theoretical contribution. Braithwaite (1989: 100-101) argued that crime (and specifically re-offending) is reduced through shaming that is "followed by efforts to reintegrate the offender back into the community of law-abiding or respectable citizens through words or gestures of forgiveness or ceremonies to decertify the offender as deviant." Family group conferences typically encircle the victim(s), offender, relatives, supporters, and community members (or "stakeholders") affected by the offence (cf. RCMP 1998). Once offenders are shamed to tearful acquiescence, a facilitator (often a police officer) aims to reach consensus on ways in which the group (including the offender) can "restore balance" or minimize the harms caused by the offence. Theoretically, Braithwaite's Crime, Shame and Reintegration integrated key contributions that were either from, or directly inspired by, the Chicago school, including Shaw and McKay's (1942) theory of social disorganization, Lemert's (1951) labelling theory, and Sutherland, Cressey, and Luckenbill's (1992) theory of differential association. Braithwaite also drew from social bond theory. (3) The family group conference thus theoretically aligned with the community policing philosophy that the RCMP and many other police forces in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States adopted in the 1980s and 1990s.

There is little doubt that the community-policing model was a radical departure from the utilitarian-based crime-control model (4) that preceded it (Alderson 1998; Normandeau and Leighton 1990; Roberg and Kuykendall 1990; Trojanowicz 1990; cf. Bentham 1843; Payley 1989). Whereas crime-control policing aimed to govern rational subjects by affecting the calculus of risks and gains (through surveillance and response), community policing generally aimed to (re)shape the conduct of subjects who are constituted by intransigent social forces (e.g., social strain, criminal subcultures, community disorganization, and social stigma). As all community problems are unique, advocates promoted a style of policing in which patrol officers and police managers directly consulted and worked with community members to identify and address local problems believed to underpin crime (Alderson; Normandeau and Leighton).

The alignment with Chicago school theory is evident in the programs that community policing engendered. Some of the earliest programs developed in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom included citizen patrols, neighbourhood watch, block parents, and seniors watch (Griffiths, Parent, and Whitelaw 2001; RCMP 1995). These programs, and others like them, helped increase local organization (Shaw and McKay 1942) and collective efficacy (Sampson et al. 1997) by mobilizing community participants in mutual watch and security. Moreover, police-school liaison programs--including peer-pressure counselling, gang resistance, (5) and a novel Canadian program that allowed school children to participate in writing speeding tickets (Griffiths et al. 2001; RCMP 1995)--have tried to limit the effects of differential association with criminal subcultures (Akers 1985; Sutherland et al. 1992). In addition, police have developed and promoted alternative programs for youth to help reduce the stigmatization of conventional criminal sanctioning (see Braithwaite 1989; Lemert 1951; Sherman 1993). In Canada and elsewhere, these have included restorative justice programs, which ostensibly date back to the 1974 implementation of the Victim Offender Reconciliation Program (VORP) in Elmira, ON (Pate 1990; cf. Zehr 1985). The RCMP's adoption of CJFs under their community-policing strategy, and indeed the broader alignment between family group conferences and community policing, can be appreciated in this general context.

To be sure, the academic literature has not denied the relationship between community policing and restorative justice. As early as 1990, Van Ness (1990) suggested that restorative justice is fully consistent with the consultative problem-solving approach of community policing. Stuart further argued that restorative justice promotes "communities to heal individuals and families and ultimately to prevent crime" (as cited in Crawford and Clear 2001: 134). Later, Bazemore (2001) and Milburn (2002) offered similar arguments. In 1996, Pavlich took this a step further. In his analysis of community mediation in British Columbia, he showed how the government tried to foster local dispute resolution to create a non-disputant ethos (1996a; 1996b). This approach is interesting because Pavlich showed how the government of British Columbia implemented community mediation strategically as a way to reshape communities rather than to simply implement a mechanism to resolve disputes with greater efficiency. More recently, Bazemore and Schiff (2001) demonstrated the direct link between community policing and the rise of community justice in the 1990s (although they were unsure how one grew from the other). Finally, Bazemore and Griffiths (2003) have reinforced this relationship by arguing that restorative justice offers tools to assist police in community engagement and capacity building. They have suggested that "restorative policing," which according to Wood and Shearing (2007: 50) privileges "local knowledge and capacity in addressing the harms caused by crimes" is the next logical step in police reform (cf. Sherman 1999; cf. Strang, Barnes, Braithwaite, and Sherman 1999). This literature has shown that restorative justice aligns with community policing, not just in principles, but also more pragmatically by engendering frameworks through which the police mobilize the community to address crime. We now turn to the specific exploration of the development of CJFs in Canada to demonstrate their rise in popularity as a broader function of the program's strategic alignment to community policing.

The development of RCMP restorative justice and community justice forums

National RCMP policy advisers recognized the popularity of restorative justice programs across Canada and their alignment to community policing in the early part of the last decade. In 1992, a...