Strengthening Ties Between Police and the Community: A Conversation about Restorative Justice in Madison, Wisconsin

Joe Balles, who recently retired as a captain after a 30-year career with the Madison (Wisconsin) Police Department, discusses restorative justice and police legitimacy with Robert V. Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. A mentee of Herman Goldstein, considered the father of problem-oriented policing, Balles was instrumental in the creation of the Dane County Community Restorative Court, a diversion program based on the Native American principles of peacemaking. The interview took place during Community Justice 2016. A panel on Restorative Justice at Community Justice 2016 features, from left, moderator Erika Sasson of the Center for Court Innovation, Jose Egurbide of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, Captain Joe Balles (retired) of the Madison (Wisconsin) Police Department, and Judge Herman Sloan of the Atlanta (Georgia) Community Court. CAPTAIN JOE BALLES: One of the reasons I got trained as a peacemaker is because I’m trying to add even more legitimacy to this work, so that it actually becomes formalized and more ingrained and peer accepted. ROB WOLF: Hi I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I am at Community Justice 2016, in Chicago, where hundreds of justice practitioners from various jurisdictions around the country and around the world, are gathering to talk about justice reform. With me right now is Captain Joe Balles, retired from the Madison Wisconsin Police Department. We’ve sat down to talk for a little bit about restorative justice. He participated in a panel here at Community Justice 2016, on restorative justice and he was very involved with that concept in his work in the Madison Police Department. You were involved in starting something called The Dane County Community Restorative Court. So why don’t you explain what that is, and why you wanted to start something called a restorative court that has this word ‘restorative’ in it? BALLES: Sure Rob it would be a pleasure. In 2013 the NEKC foundation funded a study in Dane County, it was conducted by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families. And that report, published in October 2013 really statistically laid out what was the state and the human condition of the African American population in Dane County. And their report in its breadth covered so many different measures across the spectrum that were just all jumped out and many in Dane County community, and Madison’s the capital, Wisconsin, 500,000 is the county population, almost 250 is the city of Madison, and when you look at that it was really pretty telling, and everybody just accepted it as the base-line. There was really little argument about the data or anything, it was so overwhelming. One number in particular with regards to racial injustice was that Dane County African Americans represent about 4.8 % of the population, but when you look at the number of people that we send to prison every year, African American’s in Dane County represent 44% of the people we send to prison. Based on that report a Dane County Board African American supervisor, Sheila Stubbs, who ironically I have known for many years, she brought forward a proposal in November 2013 to the County Board, and got it stuck in the 2014 budget to create a pilot Community Restorative Court in South Madison that would look a 17 and 25-year-olds and try to divert them. Those who have been arrested for misdemeanors, divert them from the formal traditional criminal justice system, to a Community Restorative Court predicated on the ideas of peacemaking in justice circles. And … WOLF: And maybe we will just pause for a second. When we talk about restorative, we’re talking about … I know it’s about restoring both the community, but also … BALLES: Repairing harm to the victim, and the community. WOLF: And the offender to an extent— BALLES: And really doing an assessment of the offender because, you know Rob, when law enforcement issues citations, or we arrest young people, 17 to 25 year-olds. For a lot of times it’s these kind of nuisance level types of crimes, if they be theft, criminal damage to property, disorderly conduct, obstructing an officer, there are other things that are going on there with that person at that point in time, that they happen to come on an officer’s radar screen. Because oftentimes when we make an arrest we are not out driving around looking for them, we get called by the 911 system because we are responding to something that we ultimately end up investigating, whether it be a fight in progress in a public place, or inside a private residence, we have to deal with what it is that we walk into. And this was a way to take. And instead of sticking that 17 -25 year-old in the formal system, where in Wisconsin, something that unlike a lot of states in the country, we have an online court system called CCAP, and once you get arrested and you then appear and make an initial appearance in Wisconsin Circuit Court, a record of you starts online on the internet in Wisconsin’s Circuit Court database. It’s totally publicly accessible, there’s all sorts of warnings about how it’s not supposed to be used for discriminatory purposes, or employment purposes etc. but everybody in Wisconsin knows about it and once you get something onto CCAP it’s impossible to get it off, damn near impossible, I won’t say it’s impossible but it’s damn near. We find these 17 to 25 year-olds, it hurts them for employment, it hurts them for schooling, hurts them for housing, many different things. WOLF: So the Community Restorative Court, they would be … that’s a total diversion, they wouldn’t have a record in the system? BALLES: It’s a total diversion. Right. And the way we have created the diversion is, in the spring of 2015 we worked, together with our Dane County District Attorney, Ishmael Ozanne, the head of our Dane County Department of Human Services, Lynn Green, Madison Police Chief, Mike Koval and our city Attorney Mike May, and myself I was involved in this. We created an MOU, and in the Memorandum of Understanding I outlined the parameters of what we were going to try to do in the pilot, and it was a 12 month MOU, it actually expires next month in May. Wel certainly expand it, continue on, but we definitely need to tweak, kind of what we are doing right now, to build some more caseload. But the important thing is that over the past year and a half now we have created another option for dealing with this behavior out in the neighborhoods, that both is victim rights focused, but at the same time focused on the needs of the offender, where we hired a Community Restorative Court coordinator. That’s a funded position, not through a grant or something that we could possibly loose, but we actually created a new position within the human services budget for Dane County where this position lives. And that’s really huge, because now we’ve got that position we don’t have to fight for it every single year. And what we’re trying to do is, our District Attorney’s office has been very creative already, they’ve got 700 cases currently in different states of deferred prosecution. And what we are really hoping to do long term is to take a piece of that deferred prosecution case load that they have right now, and those cases that go to deferred prosecution are ready and ideal, many of them primed, for a peacemaking process. WOLF: And so peacemaking, as I understand, we have a program in Brooklyn, The Center for Court Innovation runs through the Red Hook Community Justice Center is based on traditional Native American practice, bringing people together in a circle, and people solving the problem and the issue collectively. So is that the model that you are using? BALLES: Yeah it is the model. And what happened was, is that after we were looking around in the spring, or in 2014, once we had that money funded to create the coordinator court, CRC coordinator position, we got a hold of the Center for Court Innovation. And they, and with the help of some BGA Technical Assistance money, they brought our team, seven of us, out to New York where we were up in Harlem at the Community Court up there, we went down met with Judge Calabrese in Red Hook and got to see the phenomenal work he’s done. He is nothing short of an American Hero in terms of what he’s done out there. And then lastly we went over Brownsville, where at the time we were there it hadn’t started yet, but we talked with the folks and we looked at the building. I think it was an old catholic church if I’m not mistaken, or something to that effect, or maybe an old school that they were looking at setting up, but we were out there in Brownsville and talking to them too. So we left New York with a lot of great ideas that we brought back to Madison to figure out how we wanted to set this up.  And we went to work, doing community meetings where we brought the community in and told them we were looking for volunteers. We worked with Johnathan Scharrer, a person I haven’t mentioned enough. Johnathan Scharre...