In the summer of 2010, a Massachusetts man who had just retired from 33 years of policing – the last 17 as a police chief – did an odd thing for relaxation and rejuvenation: he enrolled in Howard Zehr’s restorative justice class at EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI).

Chief Len Wetherbee already knew quite a bit about the subject. While serving as chief in Concord, Massachusetts, he had read books by Howard Zehr and knew of Barry Stuart, a long-time judge in Canada who had written about the restorative ways indigenous peoples respond to “criminal” matters.

But now Wetherbee was interested in learning more about the university that had educated a bright, energetic woman he had helped recruit in 2008 to be executive director of in Massachusetts.

Her name was (MA ’04) – she had previously worked with in Charlottesville, Virginia, but landed in the Boston area when her physician-husband got a position with Tufts University.

“Chief Wetherbee called me throughout the week at SPI,” Larson Sawin recalls with a smile. “I suspected he’d be wary of the ritual components of SPI, but the coursework caught his imagination. He said the days went so quickly, five o’clock would roll around and he felt like the day had just started.”

At first, some of his SPI classmates were skeptical that police – often considered a fundamentally coercive force – could play a positive role in RJ processes. If only they had known the full scope of what was happening in Massachusetts.

Beginning in 2000, Wetherbee led his department to use restorative processes for juvenile offenses such as vandalism, trespassing, shoplifting, and bullying. The department encouraged the development of a group of trained volunteers to handle these matters, with an officer sitting in on each case.

The results were so positive, neighboring police departments got wind of the experiment and became interested too.

By the time Larson Sawin was hired in 2008, Communities for Restorative Justice had 80 trained volunteers handling referrals from police departments in two communities northwest of Boston.

Three years later, volunteers now number 100, and 10 communities are in the mix – including the urban communities of Cambridge and Arlington – with more communities knocking on the door. Offenses now include violent crime, offenders with records, and adult-initiated offenses.

“More of our police partners understand that restorative justice must treat the victim’s needs as central. If the victim wants restorative justice, it shouldn’t matter if the offender is 16 or 60, or that he broke into someone else’s house last week and therefore has a rap sheet,” explains Larson Sawin.

As an example of a successful case, Larson Sawin told of a swastika spray-painted on the side of a school building. The community wondered if there was a sleeper cell of neo-Nazis lurking about. When the young men responsible were caught, they agreed to participate in a circle process with members of the synagogue. They heard stories of childhood years spent in Nazi Germany and about all those who perished under that symbol. This encounter proved transformational for the young men.

As for the future, “we’ve got miles to go,” says Larson Sawin. “Any theory of change must include ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ strategies. While more communities are embracing this approach, we’re working towards statewide legislation. With folks like Chief Wetherbee in our corner, I know we’ll get there.”

At the end of his first year as a Fulbright scholar at CJP, Abou Ag Ahiyoya of Mali said he has been impressed with CJP’s emphasis on transformation at the grassroots level.

“Until now, I have seen a top-down approach for solving problems,” Abou said in a May 2011 interview with Peacebuilder.

Abou comes from the Tuareg ethnic group, who traditionally live nomadically in the Saharan interior of North Africa. The famous Berbers of Morocco are part of this same group.

Though Abou was raised with family members who continue to lead the nomadic life in the dessert – to this day, his mother herds her own camels, goats and sheep across a vast territory – Abou went a different route. He pursued higher education and became a high-ranking police officer at age 27, initially in Mali.

He was one of the leaders of the civilian police force dispatched to the Darfur area of Sudan by the African Union from 2005 to 2007. By 2008, he was deputy director of the National Policy Academy in Mali. As a police instructor and trainer, he has worked with the United Nations. He has been a consultant and facilitator at the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in Canada.

Despite his impressive credentials, Abou does not present himself as someone who “knows it all”— that is, as someone who prefers issuing commands rather than listening thoughtfully. Instead he seems like the type of kindly and thoughtful person that anyone would want as a neighbor, friend, father, or brother.

Abou speaks of walking 10 to 15 miles to attend a French language school as a child and of being 11 when he lost his father, an army soldier, to sickness.

Abou explains that after Mali started shifting to a democratic political system in 1990, its police force began to open itself up to minority peoples. Abou was one of the first Tuareg persons to rise to a senior police position.

At CJP, Abou says he is trying to gain a deeper understanding of the roots of conflict – and ways to mitigate it, short of using force that contributes to the cycles of violence. “I want to be a peace officer in the future,” he says. “Our prisons are full – the police and courts cannot guarantee stability and peace.”

“The AQMI [Saharan terrorists inspired by al-Qaeda] are recruiting lots of our youths because they don’t have jobs. We need to address the causes of terrorism and solve problems from the bottom up.”

Abou has seen a society that represents, for him, the worst possible social degradation. It was in Darfur. There for a while, Abou was the acting chief of police operations under the African Union, serving a vast refugee population and supervising almost 1,000 officers from about 25 African countries.

He dealt with killings, rapes, and other crimes on a daily basis. He saw children growing up without families, and tens of thousands without real homes. “I witnessed the consequences of war – I don’t want this to happen to any community or country,” he says in a soft-spoken voice.

With Abou in Harrisonburg are his wife Fadimata and two young sons, Hachime and Mohammed. Abou says they have been pleased to discover other Muslim students and families to share their experience of living in a majority Christian culture.