How healing justice reimagines the world

If you live in Boulder County, you’ve probably heard the story of Zayd Atkinson and John Smyly. On March 1, 2019, Atkinson, a Naropa University student, was picking up trash outside his apartment complex, when Smyly, then a Boulder PD officer, stopped and began asking questions. The next several minutes were tense, all caught on the officer’s body cam, as it became increasingly clear that Smyly, who is white, considered Atkinson, who is black, a threat, eventually calling for backup and even drawing a weapon.   

The community outrage was swift, as was the City’s response. Smyly resigned soon after, officials condemning his actions, saying he didn’t follow protocol. Although, he did stay on payroll until January to account for staff accrued paid leave and left with severance. Subsequent news reports followed City Council’s plan to adopt a new civilian oversight model for the police department, and a $125,000 settlement awarded to Atkinson, with little mention of Smyly.  

That is until September, when the NAACP Boulder County branch uncovered that the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office had hired Smyly for a civilian tech support role in January. The organization was quick to call the situation problematic, quicker still to applaud Smyly’s second forced resignation from a law enforcement agency in as many years — but not without offering to “work with Mr. Smyly using a ‘healing justice’ model that is similar to ‘restorative justice,’” according to a press release. 

Healing justice is an increasingly used term in the cultural vernacular of not just criminal justice reform efforts but also in Southern racial justice movements, where it has its roots. But what exactly is it? 

“I’m not sure there’s any one definition of it,” says G. Scott Brown, chair of the NAACP Boulder County Healing Justice Working Group, who also runs Active Peace Circles, a community process based in restorative justice practices. “When I think of healing justice, I think of a big umbrella, and my Active Peace Circle is just one thing. [But it all] has in common [the idea] that we have to change the system, we have to recognize that there are beliefs and assumptions that go into these repetitious patterns of harm and abuse, and we have to do our utmost to break those cycles because it’s killing people and it’s killing us as a society.“  

If healing justice is an umbrella, then the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, along with its cofounder Cara Page, is the manufacturer. 

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