The ambiguous practice of restorative justice: Observations on conflict mediation in a police context

This paper discusses conflict mediation as an addition to community police work. After contextualising our topic within the scientific literature about restorative justice and restorative policing, the paper presents six in-depth cases involving neighbour disputes, a street fight, domestic violence and non-consensual sharing of nude images. Our action-oriented research aims to describe the mediation sessions and evaluate them in light of three core principles of restorative justice. The conflicting parties must (a) voluntarily enter into a dialogue, and during this dialogue, the mediator needs to (b) address their individual needs and (c) promote healing, repair and restoration. We conclude that it is challenging to apply these principles fully in everyday practices of mediation in a community policing context. First, the symbolic dimension of police authority may sometimes have played a role in bringing conflicting parties together voluntarily, where previous attempts had failed. Second, in one case, the underaged victim and the offender were represented by their parents, leaving the protagonists’ needs out of the equation. Finally, we did not witness full healing and restoration in any of the cases. Instead, the mediator and the conflicting parties tried to arrive at pragmatic conflict resolution based on individual needs.