Description
Re-Defining Justice and Creating Pathways for Healing: The Limits of the US Legal System and the Promise of Politicised Healing as a Model for Redressing Racialised Harm
David Anderson Hooker (Associate Professor, Practice of Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA & Sheila A Bedi (Professor of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and Director, Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, Evanston, USA)
The long history of the Chicago Police Department (CPD)’s racialised violence instructs that when considering widespread multifaceted harm, a single form of justice—or even a combination of several forms of justice combined—provides too limited a framework for recourse and remedy. Instead, a new framework altogether is required.
In this article, the authors summarise more than 100 years on unrelenting racialised violence by the Chicago Police Department. Expanding the analytical framework first offered by Coleen Murphy, the authors also consider seven approaches to justice to determine under which circumstances each particular approach to justice might provide a comprehensive, holistic, and healing measure of relief.
Ultimately, it is argued that theories of justice are insufficient to redress the harm of police violence and that politicised healing is a promising approach that takes wisdom from syndemic theory for redressing the deep, political and historical roots of racialised police violence.
