Over 30 years ago, Rudi Lammers sat on the floor of a Narrabundah house, confronting a child thief, when a life-changing event unfolded.
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The ACT Chief Police Officer, then a senior constable, had been called to a burglary.
It was the sixth time someone had climbed in a window to steal items from a boy's bedroom.
This time, the offender had been caught red-handed with a pillow slip full of the neighbour's Lego – he was the nine-year-old boy from next door.
"I said to the nine-year-old [victim], 'What do you think we should do?' and he did something very surprising and unexpected," Assistant Commissioner Lammers said on Monday.
"He reached over, grabbed the pillow slip, tipped out half the Lego and gave the remainder to the other child, the thief, and he said, 'Any time you want to play Lego, come over. But can you come through the front door, because Dad gets really cranky when you come through the window'."
Assistant Commissioner Lammers related the story at the ACT Legislative Assembly for the launch of Canberra as a restorative justice city.
The concept brings a victim of crime face to face with their offender, if they choose to attend a conference, rather than go to court.
"But that's not the end of the story," Assistant Commissioner Lammers told the audience.
He recalled that a few years ago, he was approached by a stranger at a local club.
"The man came over and whispered in my ear, 'Do you know who I am? I'm the Lego boy from Narrabundah – that experience changed my life'," he said.
"He said he had stopped stealing and now runs a building company and had never come to police notice again.
"I don't know if that was an early form of restorative justice, because the terminology wasn't used then.
"When restorative justice was mooted, it was considered the soft approach, not real policing, with no long-term community benefit. Put simply, it was considered by many people to be absurd.
"Canberra lends itself beautifully to the concept of a restorative city or a restorative community, but first we need to move further away from the traditional paradigm of arrest, charge, prosecute, incarcerate – that is simply not an answer for everything."
The last ACT budget included $429,000 to roll out the second phase of the government's restorative justice scheme to take in adult offenders and referrals for more serious crimes. It has been operating with juvenile offenders.
Assistant Commissioner Lammers said a priority was to stop the cycle of intergenerational crime.
"We know that children of parents with no criminal record have a 76 per cent chance of avoiding a criminal conviction themselves," he said.
"We also know that if both parents have criminal convictions, there's less than a 27 per cent chance of that child avoiding a criminal conviction.
"Those statistics are quite sobering and there are many ways to change behaviours in people – restorative justice is just one of those.
"Traditionally, we like to prosecute because we think the community expects that.
"Take, for instance, the 14-year-old child who steals two Mars Bars from the corner shop. The shopkeeper wants this child prosecuted, but there's a better way than that.
"Take, for example, the young mother who steals a can of baby formula from the local chemist – the first reaction is arrest and charge.
"A better way is not to bring them to a police station, not to bring them into the judicial system and to divert them from that. And restorative justice is one mechanism to do that."
