Old style restorative policing to cut crime

New Police Commissioner Howard Broad wants police officers to resolve small-scale disputes between neighbours and partners before they escalate into violence.

The new approach, which he calls "restorative policing", will use the techniques of restorative justice to get people to apologise and make reparations to people they have hurt - well before anyone commits a crime.

Commentators said it represented a return to the old style of policing in small communities where police officers knew what was going on and intervened early to prevent crime.

The national manager of police prosecutions, Superintendent Graham Thomas, told a Restorative Justice Aotearoa conference in Auckland yesterday that Mr Broad wanted to shift the police focus from just catching and convicting criminals to resolving disputes in the community.

"Convictions will always be a focus, but we are recognising that it's not a one-size-fits-all," he said.

"We have a need to tailor our responses in the most effective way, to the extent of restorative processes where there is a complaint against a police officer, for example, or restorative policing - to apply a better process to household disputes, neighbour disputes, that sort of thing."

Mr Broad wanted police officers to be "more proactively connected with communities" and "the restorative process helps that proactive side", Mr Thomas said.

"In many instances, it would provide an opportunity to nip offending or situations in the bud, rather than allowing things to escalate to a point where police officers are having to go back to more serious offending later."

He said police would usually still arrest an offender if violence had been committed, but in other cases might refer people to community groups to help resolve a dispute.

The police also wanted to bring more "restorative" processes into the diversion scheme, which takes about 10,000 minor offenders a year out of the courts by getting them to apologise and make reparations to their victims.

Police Association president Greg O'Connor welcomed the fresh approach, saying an arrest was "always the last resort".

"Particularly with domestic situations, alternative ways of dealing with them will always be well received by police officers," he said.

A senior lecturer in a new Restorative Justice Centre at Auckland University of Technology, Dr Shirley Julich, said the new approach would give victims more say in the justice process. She is involved in a pilot scheme bringing sexual abusers and their victims together in conferences with family and outside experts to stop the offending.

"Survivors want to see these offenders saying: 'Yes, that's right, I did that,"' she said.

"Most victims recognise that if you send them [offenders] into prison they are kept out of the general prison population ... and scared that they may just learn how to do it better without getting caught."

Early police intervention would be "a return to the policing of the past, where a police officer would go and talk to a young person and say: 'This has come to my attention, I'm keeping my eye on you, boy-o."

But Preventing Violence in the Home director Jane Drumm said restorative justice was not appropriate for domestic violence cases where one partner was scared and might feel pressured into taking part.