Engaging with Policing

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The backdrop to CRJI engaging with the criminal justice system was a highly politicized and emotionally charged landscape. The historic decision to engage with policing across the political, social and major institutions that bind the Nationalist/ Republican communities together was and continues to be momentous. The decision to engage was not taken lightly; indeed the final step came nine years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and seven years after the Patton commission reported on the way forward for policing in the North of Ireland. These are and were huge political questions of the time but for Community Restorative Justice Ireland what did they mean.

CRJI from the outset was always of the view that when policing was resolved to the satisfaction of our politicians then and only then could we engage. The decision to engage was bigger than the view of a community restorative justice organisation. We also knew that policing would be a difficult issue for many reasons for the Nationalist/Republican community to deal with not least because of the historical and political significance this issue held.

However, CRJI had been working in the community from1998 with a particular focus on the issue of punishment violence emanating from the various Armed Groups. From 1998 to 2006 CRJI made 350 positive interventions that were evaluated by professor Harry Mika, a leading American criminologist. What became clear as we were doing this work was the absolute need for policing, we were not only encountering punishment violence but a plethora of criminality including serious sex crime and murder which quite frankly was not in our, the communities gift to deal with.

These serious issues only hardened our resolve in moving in the direction of engaging with policing and if truth were told we had come to that conclusion long before the politics had been resolved around the policing question.

It is vital to understand that when we speak of engagement we mean trying to shape policing on the ground so as it can deliver an effective service to and for the communities in which we work.  This is what we were hearing in the many homes we visited over the years as members of our communities were grappling to come to terms with the impact of crime and anti- social behaviour.

Equally our own belief that punishment was not the answer to the many ails in our communities which manifested themselves in poverty, educational under achievement, unemployment and so on. The outward effects of this were drug and alcohol abuse, violence in the home & community and a sense of hopelessness that was prevalent among particular groups of working class young people. Can anybody seriously make the argument that these issues could be shot away or imprisoned?

CRJIs view is that these issues won’t be solved through punishment of whatever kind. We believe that it is the behaviour and the underpinning causes of the behaviours that need to be changed and tackled. This is the big question for society, how do we collectively impact on the behaviours that fuel crime and anti social behavior?

CRJI is promoting joined up approaches in the Criminal Justice world through multi agency working. We have developed our own capacity to this end, we are now a government-accredited organisation and can lead the community engagement on these issues but in a sense what we are doing is firefighting.

We would be advocating for early interventions with families who need support.  We would advocate that restorative approaches to conflict management be ciriculimed and embedded in our education system and the really big issue is that we begin to build a society based on the principles of social justice and inclusion, that's the challenge for us all, are you up for that? CRJI is.