Bridging police and communities through relationship: the importance of a theoretical foundation for restorative policing

ABSTRACT

Various models of policing have been studied in the past, but have primarily focused on practice. The current paper applies Llewellyn’s integration of relational theory and restorative justice to the notion of restorative policing. The paper explores how several demographic factors, police organisational support and theoretical constructs associated with relational theory influence the willingness of police officers (n = 296) to engage in practices associated with a restorative approach to policing. The current analytic results evidence relational theory as providing a previously absent and untested theoretical foundation within the discussion of restorative policing.

KEYWORDS:

• Restorative policing
• community
• relational theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Sir Robert Peel is often wrongly cited as having said ‘the police are the public and the public are the police’ (Lentz & Chaires, 2007). As outlined in the summary of professional policing here, officers were originally drawn from populations outside of where they were to police to maintain professionalism and consistency.

2 Two services did not deal with youth offences, and one small municipal service did not respond to the research request.

3 Relationship-building includes: I spend a lot of time getting to know people in the community; I get a lot of assistance and collaboration from community residents; I work a lot with community agencies and services.

4 Interdependence includes: I believe that nowadays there is too much community direction in my police organisation; I believe that nowadays there is too much community input in my police organisation; I would not support restorative justice because criminal justice interventions should be left to professionals.

5 Right to participate includes: In minor offences, offenders should be given the opportunity to attempt to repair the harm they have caused; In major offences, offenders should be given the opportunity to attempt to repair the harm they have caused; Victims and offenders should be allowed to meet in a supervised setting to discuss the harm that has been caused by the offender’s crime.

6 Organisational factors include: My organisation protects its members from external pressures and criticisms; There is a positive working relationship between officers and managers in our office.

7 These figures are consistent with the national figures indicating that women represent 20 per cent of police officers as reported by Statistics Canada (2015).

8 Additionally, the data were checked for missing values. All variables have a missing value rate well below 10 per cent, indicating the missing cases are missing completely at random and will not affect the overall nature of the analyses.

9 While there has long been contention about how many categories must be present in a categorical variable to constitute a ‘continuous’ variable for the purposes of multiple regression analysis, according to Rhemtulla, Brosseau-Liard, and Savalei (2012), there is little difference between using a five-point categorical variable from a seven-point categorical variable in a multiple regression, when all other main assumptions have been met. For this reason, we have chosen to proceed with a five-point item as the dependent variable.