Restorative policing: ACT Chief Police Officer and expert criminologists in conversation

We are thrilled to be hosting this exciting panel discussion between the ACT Chief Police Officer, Justine Saunders, and expert criminologists Larry Sherman and Heather Strang from Cambridge University. The panel will debate the positives and negatives of restorative justice from the perspective of the police, the victims and the offenders, and discuss the latest programs for reducing re-offending in Australia as well as in the Northern hemisphere. The panel will also be open to questions from the audience. The discussion will be facilitated by RegNet’s John Braithwaite, who has pioneered research in the field of restorative justice - an alternative approach to reducing rates of re-offending, which seeks to bring together the offender and the victim in a supervised environment to discuss the harm that has been done, with a focus on the offender taking responsibility and repairing that harm. For catering purposes please RSVP at http://regnet.anu.edu.au/events/rsvp/6788/conversations-restorative-poli... by midday 2 June 2016. This is a meeting of the Canberra Restorative Community Network hosted by RegNet, Australian National University About the Speakers Professor Lawrence W. Sherman is Director of the Institute of Criminology of the University of Cambridge, where he has served as Wolfson Professor of Criminology since 2007. He is also Director of the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology and Chair of the Cambridge Police Executive Programme. His research interests are in the fields of crime prevention, evidence-based policy, restorative justice, police practices and experimental criminology. For more detail visit his profile. Dr. Heather Strang is an experimental criminologist who has worked with police departments and criminal justice agencies in Australia, the US and UK. As Director of the Centre for Restorative Justice at the Australian National University, she directed a ten-year followup of over 3,000 victims and offenders who have participated in restorative justice meetings in Canberra, London, Northumbria and Thames Valley. She has a special interest in victims of crime which continues to be the focus of her own research. For more detail visit her profile. Assistant Commissioner Justine Saunders APM has been a member of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) for 27 Years. She spent her first 10 years performing a range of community policing functions and detective roles in general and specialised investigative areas within the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). Assistant Commissioner Saunders then moved into the National AFP arena where she undertook leadership roles in operational teams responsible for transnational crime, drug importations, people smuggling, counter terrorism, fraud and intelligence. She commenced the role of the Chief Police Officer for the ACT on November 2016. For more detail visit her profile.