I'm surprised at the reaction on this list to the Restorative Justice project. Maybe that's because I didn't read any accounts in the newspaper.
I can sympathize with Jill, and hope you do get justice served. I would like to give you some background on this. This project was started by a group of churches working with the police department. I was a part of that group. It consisted of many different faiths, and black and white members. There were also other non-profit groups in participation. The project wasn't originally (at least in my understanding) aimed at only or even primarily a black audience. However, after working on it for a while the African American Men's Project joined in and contributed heavily in promoting and furthering the event. And I do mean heavily, investing their own dollars and manpower to get the word out. I suppose if there were a "White Men's Project" that joined in it may have been promoted more to whites. No one who wanted to help was turned away. Point is, it was an effort by a good group to make a positive difference. Anyone could join our group. "The table is always open," our coordinator would frequently say. One list member complained about the sponsors--"could have advertised it better" or something. Well, anything can always be better. We did everything we could think of with the limited resources we had. This wasn't funded by anyone's tax dollars. This was a bunch of churches and non-profits trying to get the word out. It took tremendous effort and coordination to pull off this event. We thought if 200 people signed up we would be lucky. We had over 1200 sign up. All cases were reviewed by actual city (or maybe it was county) prosecutors and real judges. If these people would have made it happen to show up in a "normal" court, it could have gone much the same. Understand this was a faith-based initiative. Cleaning up the court systems backlogs, saving taxpayer dollars--these things I imagine may have happened to one degree or another, but were not the prime motivation. The prime motivation (at least in my understanding) was to help people (white/black/periwinkle) who were carrying a burden over their head. To give them a chance to do something about it, and to give upstanding community members a means to help these people. Participants working at our church site commented how it felt good to be giving something back to the community. It might seem silly that a person with an old traffic ticket would need that kind of relief, but maybe it's a good sign about human nature that he even felt bad about it. Everyone is free to his or her opinion on this project. I think it did more good than harm. It's easy to find fault, it's not so easy sometimes to step in and try to do something. I'm proud to have worked on this project, and proud to have been associated with all the fine members of the interfaith initiative that made it happen. Brian Fesler Keewaydin TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
