10 Years of Community Justice in Melbourne, Australia: An Interview with Kerry Walker

In this New Thinking podcast, Kerry Walker, director of the Neighbourhood Justice Centre in Melbourne, Australia, describes some of the ways the Justice Centre engages the community, all with the long-term goal of promoting the rule of law and a “civil, caring society.” She reflects on lessons learned as the Justice Centre approaches its 10th anniversary, including, “Never act alone [but] only … in partnership.” The podcast concludes with a discussion of ways the Justice Centre is using technology to promote safety and make the court more user-friendly.  The interview took place while Walker was in Chicago to attend Community Justice 2016. Kerry Walker of the Neighbourhood Justice Centre in Melbourne, Australia, discusses best practices for community justice during a session at Community Justice 2016.   The following is a transcript KERRY WALKER:   Allow for the unintended consequence, because it’s often stronger than your first program idea. ROB WOLF:  Hi, this is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I’m at Community Justice 2016 in Chicago, Illinois. It’s an international summit that’s brought together over 400 people interested in court reform. With me right now is Kerry Walker, who is the director of the Neighbourhood Justice Centre in the city of Yarra, which is part of the city of Melbourne, Australia. Hi Kerry. WALKER:   Hello Robert. WOLF:   I thought it would be interesting to talk to you today about the Neighbourhood Justice Centre, because you are shortly going to celebrate your tenth anniversary. WALKER:  We are. WOLF:   Congratulations. WALKER:  Thank you. WOLF:   I thought we could talk about the Justice Centre generally, and also focus in on community engagement, which is something that is an important part of community courts and community justice centers, and something that I know you guys are particularly good at doing. Why don’t we start with that. Let’s talk about community engagement. Maybe you can just define the term for me, because I think for people unfamiliar with community courts, they might say, “Why is a court of any kind engaging with the community? A court is supposed to remain apart from the community, above the community.” Maybe you could explain to me what community engagement means. WALKER:   Community engagement for us is premised on the principle that ordinary citizens have a right to understand the law. They have a right to feel justice in their communities, and they have the right to be part of that relationship between the law and themselves and their neighbours. I think it’s a new way of looking at the rule of law, and to say that justice must play an active role in a community. If we are serious that what we want to do via courts and via the rule of law, is to have a civil caring society where there is strong stewardship and tolerance and fairness, then we must play a part in that. WOLF:   Let’s talk a little bit about that. You have neighbourhood in your name, and community justice, which is the approach you’re speaking of, has the word community in it, so that means that there’s a very local element, you’re working in a particular neighbourhood. How exactly do you let the community initiate things? How do you communicate or open that communication? WALKER:  I can give you some examples of the type of activity we do. For instance, if there is to be a local festival, we will ring and say, “We would love to be a part of that, and we would love to come to the festival, but in order to come to the festival, we want to help either take the minutes or do the photocopying or help put up the tents. We want to do something, we want to be really active. We don’t want to just turn up on the day with our trestle table and our books and say, ‘Hi, aren’t we lovely and wonderful, come and talk to us and we’ll tell you what we do.'” We, I think, show by example about putting our shoulder to the wheel, and show that we are really serious in participating, and therefore getting to know people. WOLF:   Where’s the intersection of justice? If you’re involved in a community activity, how does that intersect with what you’re actually doing in the court? WALKER:   We have quite a different legal system to the American system, and it is, in some ways, more monolithic and more difficult to have that participatory interaction at the court phase. However, what we have done is the community work part of what we do, is very carefully chosen. WOLF:   What do you mean? Community work can mean like a restitution project, which a defendant might be sentenced to as part of their sentence? WALKER:    Yes. WOLF:   I see. Does the community help you identify areas where crime and safety issues, where the court can focus on certain safety issues, whether it’s street corners or types of offending that the community’s concerned about? WALKER:   Yes. We are part of a number of local safety committees that we have been invited to be members of that. Again, we wait to be invited. We don’t say, “We’re the Justice Center, we should be a part of this.” What we say is, “If there is ever an opportunity where you think we could be helpful, we would love to take that up.” Invariably we do get invited. We also are invited to a number of resident-led types of meetings and committees. We always have the voice of the community. The other part is that there are lots of groups in the community who use our building to meet. We’ll ask, at times, that they would like one of us to come and talk to them about a particular issue, or might just grab us as we’re there. It’s both informal and formal, but we try to embed ourselves in what is resident-led. We’re always also trying to leverage off the talents and the strengths of the community. We’ve just been involved in this big project of street art, and it’s really an anti-graffiti project. They wanted some money from us, and I said, “Yeah, I’m happy to do that, because I think it’s really worthwhile and I can see that it’s a crime-prevention activity.” I said, “But, you are really popular with young people, so what I want is for you to mentor and teach some young people how to do some stencil art, but on our back wall so that they will come into the center and that they will have a confidence about what it means.” WOLF:   I see, and the young people aren’t necessarily involved in the justice system. WALKER:   No. WOLF:   They’re just young people from the community. WALKER:  Yeah. WOLF:   I suppose the impact that you’ve had on community perceptions or attitudes towards the justice system, is that something … That would be hard to measure. Do you have, apart from anecdotally, a sense of how you perhaps, over the last ten years, have, through your engagement, affected community attitudes towards the justice system? WALKER:  Well, what we know is that the police tell us that their relationship with the community has improved, they say, a thousandfold, because of their relationship with us. People trust them much more because of us. We know that the Aboriginal community feels much safer with justice than they have felt before we came, because they tell us that, and we know that when we first came, very rarely would an Aboriginal person turn up for their court case. We have done a lot of work over the years about encouraging that confidence, and now we have a turn up rate between 85 and 95%. But we have done things like have a specific day for Aboriginal people where we put on a kangaroo barbecue, and we invite their families and their support as well as local agencies. It becomes much more than just, “Oh yes, you’re here to be processed.” It is actually a way of saying, “No, no. This building, this place, is a part of the community, and you are always welcome here.” WOLF:   Tell me, in January you’re going to turn ten, the Neighbourhood Justice Center’s going to turn ten. Do you have any lessons you can share for people who are interested in community justice, in community courts, and just interested in building better relationships between the justice system and their communities? WALKER:   I think some of the lessons we’ve learned … One of the big lessons we’ve learned was that we got it right when we said, “We will never act alone, we will only ever act in partnership.” That, I think, has worked, in that it’s stopped us getting too cocky and it means if I think I’ve got a good idea, then I actually have to go outside and find someone else who thinks it’s a good idea, or it’s not going to happen. I have hung onto what I think are good ideas, sometimes for years, until I can find someone who will say yes. WOLF:   Someone in the community per se? Or could be another agency? WALKER:   In the community or it could be another agency. But for instance, I have been attending a community meeting now for ten years, and at that meeting, I, maybe every third or fourth meeting, I talk about the Baltimore Community Conferencing Center. “Would...