In firing officer, university missed opportunity for restorative practices

In firing Officer Drew Matthews, the CU Police Department and Chief Doreen Jokerst have missed a golden opportunity to demonstrate restorative justice in action.

Restorative practices are highlighted on the CU website as a cornerstone of their code of conduct, yet it seems that is mostly lip service.

Should Officer Matthews have been fired? Maybe.

But in firing him before trying any restorative processes, the university didn’t really create any change, and no healing took place within the community.

What if, instead, Officer Matthews was asked to shadow people experiencing homelessness, to actually sit down, faceto-face, and listen to stories and witness the impact of policing on the unhoused first hand? Perhaps he could have become an agent for change within the system.

But we will never know. On the other hand, groups like SAFE Boulder will be emboldened by the false belief that they are making real changes and a real difference when in reality they are just making a minor inconvenience for the CU Police Department. Make no mistake, this has now been swept under the rug. No meaningful policy changes have happened, nor will they.

Punishment is easy, reformation is hard.

Putting a department on blast, or doxxing individual officers will not lead to change. If SAFE Boulder is serious about improving the treatment of the unhoused in Boulder, then they need to wake up to the fact that the police are not going anywhere and it is more productive to work with them to enact reform and policy changes than it is to get individual officers fired.

Looking forward, Chief Jokerst should consider implementing a restorative justice action plan for when situations like this occur.

However, I do believe this is unlikely because it is easier to just fire the officer and move on to the next one.

— Emerson Book, Arvada