True Community Policing Means Restorative Justice

If you want to understand how our City’s crime issues are linked to social service cutbacks, you should ask an Oakland police officer.

Community Policing has become one of those "assumed good things" that we all are supposed to support. But what do we mean by community policing? Does it mean we should be happy with just having a police officer at a community meeting, or on the street? Is a beat cop the whole story? Is there a role for the community beyond being informants?

My view of Community Policing has to do with merging community values and existing statues. Local communities need to be involved in helping community youth become aware and understand what is acceptable and what is not.

Does this mean that the local community can ignore what is illegal? No, of course not, and no credible advocate of Community Policing suggests otherwise. The question then becomes one of priorities, an appropriate and proportional response, and what we are asking law breakers to do for their community.

I think we all agree that we want law breakers to stop breaking the law—for the betterment of all involved. Almost everyone believes there should be some form of discipline, restitution to victims, and intention for criminals to start a new life pulling their own weight with a job and proper support. But, this requires thinking differently about the issue.

This is where Restorative Justice comes in. Restorative Justice (RJ) is a philosophy that believes in the power and influence of individual communities to work together toward improving the lives of everyone living in that community. In practice, RJ is collaboration between the perpetrator, the perpetrator's family, local neighbors, the DA and the police, and local government. The mechanism is a community meeting in lieu of a trial where the victim is part of the process and their needs are taken into account. One of the assumptions here is that the accused is taking responsibility for their crime without a legal defense.

How does RJ help communities? With a team of neighborhood members and community-based organizations working in collaboration with law enforcement and city officials, an integration plan is established to get the perpetrator re-integrated in society via a job, some form of training, or back in school. At the same time, a restitution plan is created where the perpetrator makes restitution to the victim. The result: Our police, courts, and jails are freed up to deal with those who really need them and are indeed dangerous to society.

Restorative Justice is a way for the community to set the terms of its own restoration. It is a way separating out social issues from hardcore criminal issues. It is a nuanced way of dealing with criminal issues that allows police to enforce serious crime while providing those in need with humane social solutions and services that divert them away from jails and back into our communities as functional members.

So what would that police officer tell you about our social services?

Our former Police Chief Richard Word said that there is at least one of four elements common to most of the crimes we see in Oakland. He cited the following four elements:

• Parolee Recidivism: most California parolees will re-offend and go back to jail. We have the worst rate in the nation.
• School Truancy: a high percentage of our high school students are chronically out of school and on our streets.
• Homelessness: is another layer of society with little or nothing to loose and no support for their mental health or substance abuse issues.
• Substance Abuse: informs many social problems, motivates people into sex work, and is a big part of gang life, domestic violence, and homelessness.

Chief Word went on to describe how cutbacks to social services in every one of these four areas has significantly increased the load on police while reducing alternatives for police in dealing with what are often medical and social problems. In short, Oakland has substantial public health challenges masking as criminal issues.

I was very impressed with what he said that day, and I have continued to ask Chief Word’s questions of every politician who has spoken at the Oakland Chamber Of Commerce’s monthly "Inside Oakland" meetings in the years since. I have something of a reputation for asking hard questions there, but in fact I am only asking Word's question: What are you going to do about it? The answers have not been inspiring.

Another officer I really respect is Trent Thompson. He is a "problem solving community officer," and my neighborhood is on his beat. My neighborhood has a few of the seriously emotionally disturbed street people that get right in your face at various business doorways. Officer Thompson was honest with us about how little gets done when the police use the 5150 rule to have someone evaluated by the County for mental health issues. His view was that the County has standing room only, and they put everyone back onto the street in a matter of hours. Check out the following link for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5150_%28Involuntary_psychiatric_hold%29

According to another candid police officer, Captain Anthony Toribio, about half of murder victim families and friends do not cooperate with police investigations. If this is not a sign of a community and police trust issue, I do not know what is. He went on to state that there are about 2,100 crime report cases every month that are shelved because there is no way to investigate the cases. He let us know that for the 1,300 Oaklanders on Parole, most of who—statistically—are expected to go back to jail, he has five ankle bracelets. Is this an image of abundant public services? My son asked him what it would take for the police to have enough resources to deal with the issues in his district, but he was abruptly cut off by Jane Breuner telling us that we will need to do deep Measure Y cuts in police, and other cuts, unless we—of course—vote for her next tax increase.

It needs to be clearly stated: social services and diversion programs do not add up to full community policing, not even with beat officers and more community outreach officers. Oakland is way behind in this regard.

But, the community has to let its voice be heard. One of the things that our local NCPC does, albeit informally, is to set priorities for the month. Our communities need to set their priorities, neighborhood by neighborhood, and become part of establishing standards.

How is this done? There is no easy answer, but there are some obvious questions that tell us where to look first. Local community groups will tell you how they have been asked for their opinions before—only to be ignored. Others will point out how laws are made that are woefully unfair to minority groups and to the poor. That crack cocaine penalties are so much higher than those for powder cocaine penalties is only now being fixed—maybe. This is of course after decades of sentencing young men to long prison terms.
What kind of a democracy adopts laws that alienate so many people? How can the community feel like they are part of the law when it is so unfairly applied to them?

The road to community policing starts with the community. Restorative Justice is a way to include communities in policing initiatives that empower and fairly benefit the majority of Oakland’s citizens.