Done to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive,” fittingly

Today, DCPT is led by a six-member board and holds training meetings more than once a month. They have one staff administrator, 15 trainers, 30 core team members, and occasional interns, in addition to one-off volunteers and community partners. According to McCarthy, the team is demographically about half Black and Latino at all levels of leadership, and a majority are female.

“A lot of people are kind of looking for some connection, or support, or ways to be constructive,” McCarthy said, noting the group has grown during the pandemic. “We’ve got a bunch of folks who say well, I want to volunteer, can you train me?”

The answer to that question lies in DCPT’s other major initiative: restorative justice events. Both individuals and organizations can benefit from trainings and discussions that focus on nonviolent communication, bystander intervention, and racial justice, among others.

“Peace circles,” DCPT’s restorative justice roundtables, are at the forefront of this initiative. Facilitators find the circles to be a reliable way to lead community conversations and reach group understandings about conflicts and struggles, as well as ways to collectively heal.

Through a series of rounds, each person in the circle answers the same set of questions set for the event, listens to others, and at the end shares a few key takeaways. The goal is to create a structured listening space that gives everyone a chance to speak and respond to issues the group faces day-to-day.

“These circle processes kinda facilitate folks being able to identify the harm and coming up with places to heal,” McCarthy said.

In addition to bringing peace circles to the city, McCarthy has also introduced the practice at his day job—a Justice and Peace Studies professor at Georgetown University. He worked with student DCPT members to host a campus peace circle during homecoming.

As the pounding rhythm of “Levitating” echoed across campus parties, four students and an administrator came together to talk about the challenges of returning to campus and the Georgetown they wanted to create. Georgetown’s circle featured questions about the challenges of returning to campus (exhaustion, social pressure, enforcing COVID-19 protocol) and how students found community during the pandemic (art, cooking, re-forming connections). Before going to join the day’s festivities, students offered one takeaway they wanted to share with campus: Overwhelmingly, there was a hope to do better supporting each other.

The impacts of these types of circles can be hard to quantify, though the fact people keep coming to DCPT’s monthly offerings or requesting them for their community is encouraging for organizers like McCarthy. But discussions organized with a specific purpose can have a clearer impact. According to one DCPT circle leader, Heather Thompson, it’s often a rewarding one.

Thompson learned about restorative justice through her own experience in one version of the circle: the victimoffender dialogue. Nearly 20 years after her brother was murdered, she met with the man who killed him in a meeting led by a facilitator from the Maryland Department of Corrections. Feelings of anger, grief, and frustration were channeled into a conversation in 2019 about their backgrounds and Thompson’s brother. The conversation, which began with a hug, helped her remember that he was human, and allowed their connection to be characterized not just by hurt, but by apology.

“When he came in the room the first thing I did was hug him. And I felt this immense like type of respect for him, because he was a human being. And all the years before he was just an image, he was just a figure to me. He wasn’t really real,” Thompson said.

Though Thompson requested the meeting with her brother’s murderer, victim-offender dialogues can be suggested by judges in court as well, though both parties have to agree for a dialogue to begin. Not every state offers them, and they can’t be used for all offenses. While Thompson’s dialogue wasn’t run by DCPT, they do offer training on how to lead one—the first step towards Thompson’s ambition of making the practice more common.

“Leaving the door open for an offender, leaving it open for a victim, leaving it open for the prosecution to just say ‘let’s see what happens’, it’s something I have become incredibly passionate about,” she said. “If we look at people for who they are, and not the actual action, and we take the time to get to know them, and their mitigating circumstances, they deserve a chance at restorative justice, just as our victim does.”

These practices aren’t guaranteed to work— Thompson’s mantra is to remember the dialogue might not go anywhere this time. As a Black woman in the restorative justice space, which is fairly white and at its worst, can appropriate South Asian cultural traditions, Thomson can attest to how structural barriers and inequalities can persist in circles intended to break them down.

“It can be difficult at times, especially if you’re in space where you are the only person of color, and trying to work through the harms,” she said. One time while she was the only person of color in a circle, a participant said “all lives matter.” She described the words as a gut punch, but said she tried to separate her personal animosity to the statement and continue to use the circle as a point of growth.

Restorative justice practices have gained traction in recent years as widely shared accounts and incidents of police officers killing Black people—in line with a long history of racist policing practices—continue to raise questions about whether America’s current vision of public safety actually protects people. In addition to overwhelming evidence that the police use excessive force in racist ways, law enforcement philosophy sets officers apart from the population until something has already gone wrong.

DCPT’s restorative justice circles and civilian protection services are just one form of civilian alternatives. These reforms are generally part of the solution implied by calls to defund or abolish the police. Some volunteers with the organization describe themselves as abolitionists, who feel that community safety cannot be achieved under the supervision of the police, an institution built on theories of racism and coercive violence. For abolitionists, the role of an organization like DCPT is to replace traditional policing structures with unarmed, more accountable civilian teams. Those against abolition, like Corbin, see their role as supplemental.

“I think the police have a role and I think there are appropriate times to call them,” he said. In his ideal world, organizations like the DCPT would work alongside police and incorporate restorative justice into the law enforcement’s daily practices.

One of the best-known examples of civilian alternatives to policing is the Newark Community Street Team (NCST). Founded by Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, NCST is part of the city’s attempt to reform policing as mandated by a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice. Like the DCPT, the NCST deploys civilians to do outreach and intervene in disputes, as well as provide safe passage to school for children in high-risk areas. That team, UCLA researchers found, “effectively decreased crime while increasing community trust as well as public safety,” showing there is potential for programs like DCPT to replace traditional policing systems.

DCPT has been coming to this area since August, McCarthy says, and has de-escalated about 30 incidents. While their most obvious goal is to diffuse conflict, a lot of their time is spent on the other prong to their approach: connecting the people experiencing homelessness in the plaza to resources, their community, and each other.

Back in the plaza, McCarthy remained on alert the few times MPD walked through, but nothing happened. He checked that all the sleeping residents were breathing, and asked those awake if they had coats for the upcoming hypothermia season. When two men almost got into a fight over a stolen hat, he stood between them. One of them, who McCarthy knows well, quickly shifted into deescalation mode and the two calmed down the instigator. Police did not seem to notice.

The plaza is just one of dozens of public spaces in D.C. that might benefit from DCPT coverage, but the team doesn’t have the resources to expand. Newark’s NCST is funded by its city, and has access to resources the DCPT can only dream of. DCPT members are paid for their shifts but have limited availability and deployments are often small.

And, while the DCPT members often have more in common with those they are protecting than the police do, it’s not exactly a community protecting itself.

DCPT might be demographically representative of the attendees at the farmer’s market or a political rally, but this isn’t the case in the current community deployment. DCPT members are whiter, richer, and less likely to speak Spanish than those they serve in the plaza, which both presents a logistical language barrier and means intervention, while well-intentioned, can feel paternalistic. The team also has little power to address the structural reasons— gentrification, disenfranchisement, a thin social safety net, abhorrent racial disparities in access to education and wealth—that the high risk areas exist.

These concerns, though, were not on Jose’s mind that night. As one of the newcomers to the plaza, Jose has been to several community organizations, but never felt connected. “Nobody listens to me. I’m being really real right now,” he said to McCarthy. “But you two do.” It might not sound like a declaration of public safety, but McCarthy hopes it’s enough to keep everyone safe for the night. G