The young Moomba rioters: Restoring faith in justice

But for now there was silence. A nervous fitful silence filled with tension and distress.

The young men sat slumped in their seats, heads low, eyes down. Next to them were their parents, anxious about what was about to be said. Directly opposite them, all the people they had hurt - the victims, the organisers, the police, the community elders - those who had been caught up directly or indirectly in what is now known as the Moomba riots.

One of them was Bill Coleby.

The guy who keeps you safe

Bill Coleby is always in control. He has to be. A renowned risk and emergency management consultant, Coleby is contracted by event organisers across Australia. White Night Melbourne. Adelaide Fringe Festival. And of course Moomba Festival. His job is to control and manage conflict, to keep people safe.

On the evening of March 12, 2016, the crowd was already assembled. Few if any would believe how much planning had gone into the event, the 18 months of preparations, the wardens, security, police, the businesses that had invested millions in equipment, music, entertainment.

Children, couples, friends and families watched from the river banks next to Federation Square as fireworks lit up the cool autumn sky.

And then, as darkness closed in, chaos.

The first Coleby had heard of it was a tweet. The police had seen it earlier that evening and passed the information on. Some kids were planning a brawl.

To be honest, says Coleby now, for him it was nothing out of the ordinary. Even for the determinedly family-friendly event. "Every year there's always issues of youths that are getting around Moomba. There's always gangs, there's always fights, it's just what happens. But we are always in control. So this year wasn't seen as anything out of the ordinary," Coleby said.

What was different was that everything was caught on camera.

This is what they saw. Hundreds of young people, mostly teenage boys - members of rival gangs Apex and Islander 23 - brawling. Using chairs as weapons. Armed with real weapons, too: knives, knuckle dusters, bats and even Samurai swords.

Families were forced to take cover inside restaurants and cafes. Others were caught up in the chaos. Some were cut and bruised, or doused in capsicum spray from the police response.

Fights broke out in 11 different parts of the city. There were robberies and serious assaults.

Videos filmed on phones showed mobs of young men chanting "f--- the police" outside Flinders Street Station.

"They were just trashing the place," one witness, Chris Harrison, said on the evening news. "With no respect for the law, no respect for any public, or anybody like that, it was just ridiculous, the police just had no control over them whatsoever."

The fact that all of this happened after Moomba had officially finished for the evening was no comfort to Coleby. Over several hours the controller of chaos watched helplessly as the event he'd worked on tirelessly collapsed before him.

In the days, weeks and months following Moomba 2016, a taskforce was created, arrests were made, charges laid, and some of the young men were thrown into detention centres.

A special court was set up to deal with the large number of offenders involved. The Premier vowed all would face the "full force of the law".

But in the background, a different type of justice was being put to work.

"I've always been terrified by cops. Sorry my actions caused an innocent to be shocked." (An extract from one of the letters sent by young offenders to victims of the Moomba riots)

On a busy Collingwood street, three police divvy vans wait outside as about 40 people mill around in the foyer of the Neighbourhood Justice Centre.

It's a cool September evening, about four months after charges were laid against 34 young men involved in the Moomba riots. Eight of them, teenage boys aged between 16 and 18, have been ordered to attend a group conference.

You can feel the tension. There are boys from rival gangs, some seeing each other for the first time since the riots. Their nervous parents and guardians hover by their sides.

The groups make their way into the conferencing room, where a circle of seats awaits them. Offenders on one side. Seated opposite them are police, victims and community leaders.

Some four months earlier, Victoria Police took the unprecedented step of approaching the Neighbourhood Justice Centre in Collingwood to discuss how a special program might help support the victims, deter the young men and re-engage them with their communities.

"There needed to be a unique approach for an unprecedented event," said police youth resource officer Aaron Herriot some time after the conference.

"Something that held the young people accountable for what they had done, that wouldn't be seen as a soft option but to also provide them with insight into how it had affected the community, their own families, police and everyone that was there on the night."

That something is known as group conferencing.

"Thanks for giving me a voice in the court of law, fighting silence."

Conferencing is a form of "restorative justice". Unlike the retributive model that views crime as an offence against the state, restorative justice views the crime as a conflict between individuals. Forgoing the traditional approach of allocating guilt and imposing punishment, it's about repairing harm and restoring relationships.

In recent decades, conferencing has been used to resolve conflicts around the world. In Baltimore, one of the most violent cities in the United States, a community conferencing centre was opened nearly 20 years ago. In the years since, the centre has more than halved recidivism among young offenders, says director Lauren Abramson.

In Australia, conferencing has been adapted in many forms and used in schools and workplaces to confront and resolve conflicts. The Koori Court has adopted the model, which is also being rolled out for use in some family violence cases. In the Children's Court of Victoria, group conferencing is a popular pre-sentencing option. Last year alone there were 300 youth justice conferences.

But it isn't suitable for everyone. Out of the 34 young men charged after the Moomba riots, only a handful - eight - qualified. The boys had to be at the low-end of offending. They needed to have had minimal contact with police prior to the riots. They had to admit their guilt in court, and consent to the process.

The idea then had to be approved by Children's Court president, Judge Amanda Chambers.

Each of the young men then met with the justice centre's community conferencing manager, Russell Jeffrey, three times before the conference. Jeffrey would navigate throughout their turbulent journey.

"Next time I should just walk away. I learnt that controlling my anger is very important in a situation like this."

Now Jeffrey turns to the youths, who are sitting anxiously inside the crowded conference room. He wants to know exactly what happened. No evasion. No obfuscation. No lies. "What were you doing there at Moomba?" "Who were you with?", "When did things start to go wrong?"

And here's the first surprise.

One boy says he simply went to Moomba that Saturday to catch up with a friend. As they were leaving he witnessed some of the chaos unfolding. The following day, his photo was in the paper.

Many of the young men have the same story, says Jeffrey: "We knew this was happening, we just wanted to have a look, we were inquisitive."

He knows of one boy, caught up at the periphery of the violence, who returned to school the following Monday and was called into the principal's office. "[He] spoke about his principal getting the paper, banging it down on the table, and saying get out of here and don't come back until your matters are resolved," Jeffrey says.

It became clear that many of the boys had been swept up in the moment. Rather than set out for violent confrontations, they had found themselves caught in the chaos unfolding around them. "There was a bit of shock around the room about that," Jeffrey says.

Police prosecutor Katrina Hall: "To hear their different stories and what led up to that night, it painted such a different picture from what was reported in the news."

The victims

Coleby is patient. He watches and listens as each of the teenagers tells their story.

"I hope the victim understands my intentions were not cruel."

And now it's time for the victims to speak.

One by one they give their version of the night's events and beyond. Lawyers, social workers, police officers, victim support officers, an uncle, a father, a mother. A South Sudanese community worker, a Maori and Pacific Islander community worker.

They tell the young men what their behaviour has meant for the lives of others.

For some it meant lost income, damaged property, physical scars, and for others lost sleep, the trauma of the night still haunting their dreams. The community leaders speak about damaged reputations; stereotypes reinforced.

Finally it is Coleby's turn to speak.

He looks each of the young men in the eye and without hesitating tells them exactly what their offending has done to him and to Moomba's reputation.

People were frightened after the riots, he says. Businesses lost money. Moomba's crowd numbers plummeted by 50 per cent in the two remaining days.

In 20 years, he'd never seen anything like it. There had been huge hail storms, natural disasters, where they lost a day, "but they've never caused problems like this", he tells them.

"I told them, they're having, at the time, what they think is a bit of fun ???. while destroying people's livelihoods."

As a result, he said, the word "Moomba" no longer evoked fond memories of an arts festival. It had become a tagline in Victoria's youth justice crisis. "That's incredibly frustrating."

And here's another surprise. As he talks, Coleby realises the young men are listening to him, and responding.

"There were moments when they said 'Oh my god, what have we done'. There were times when they went, 'We didn't know that we had done so much damage, and had the ability to do so much damage'."

Some cry.

And then one by one they stand up and begin to apologise.

"I promise to keep many peers out of the violence. I learnt that controlling my anger is very important in a situation like this."

A "lightbulb moment" for the young offenders, Jeffrey says, is the moment the boys realised "bad things can happen if you let them happen".

"An important part of the process was, they needed to hear how they hurt other people," he says."To take on that anger, and listen to that, is something that most young people wouldn't be able to do. Their responses were thoughtful and, importantly, they all apologised."

Perhaps they were faking it. Perhaps they were doing what they thought they had to do. But Coleby doesn't think so. "The way they addressed us," he says later, "looked at us and [said] that they were terribly sorry they had frightened people."

Jeffrey feels the same. When one of the young men, a high achiever at school, heard about the impact his offending had on a victim, tears began to run down his face.

"He was visibly upset," says Jeffrey now, "and I guess some people will say they might have been crocodile tears. Well, they certainly weren't."

"What was quite remarkable for me was that he actually named all of the consequences it had to the victim, his family, the community, police. And I'm not sure he was able to articulate that beforehand."

Coleby was so moved, that moments before the end, he offered an olive branch.

"I said to all the boys, should any of them ever want to talk to me, or ever want any help with anything they were wanting to do, or advice in life, that I would offer my services.

"That was it. I didn't want to hang around after that. I left."

The father

A man stands up out of his seat and the room falls silent. All eyes are on him.

A while back, he expressed disgust at his eldest son. His son's actions at Moomba had brought shame upon his family, his community. The man worried about how the boy might influence his young siblings.

Standing in the crowded meeting room now, his voice is thick with emotion: "I forgive my son now, but I won't forget what had happened and I want to work with him to make this better."

This, says Jeffrey later, is the power of the process. "People come into conference very angry, frustrated. That anger dissipates as they understand what's happened and they gain a shared understanding of what's happened.

"They're cross at their children, frustrated, but also by association with their child, they feel that shame, too. They feel that they're being judged as a parent."

He worries how things would have gone for that father and son without the conference.

"I wonder, had he held onto that frustration, how that relationship between father and son would have been."

"Thank you for the opportunity to gain deeper knowledge. Just hope I still have my dream of going to an American college."

So what now? How do these young men stay out of trouble? "It's not [a] panacea unless you have resources to follow it up," Jeffrey says.

So, first, a written plan for each of them, with a checklist of requirements: go back to school, join a sports club. One of the boys plans to visit his home country, to strengthen his connection to his culture. He wants to be a leader in his community one day.

The boys also give commitments that they will talk to their peers - honestly, without glamorising - about their experiences and what they learnt. That they will be advocates for change.

They write those letters.

Finally, they are sent back to the Children's Court to appear again before Judge Amanda Chambers.

She is pleased that all eight seem to have repaired their relationships with their families. And to have a new respect for the justice system. For her, these results suggest that conferencing can one day be applied to other areas of youth justice, perhaps before a young person is released on parole, or in conjunction with sentencing.

Because the reality is that soon enough they will all be released back into the community (in Victoria the maximum time a young person can be held in detention is three years).

"Unless we put things in place to ensure they're not simply returning to a situation that doesn't support them," says the judge, "that period of detention potentially will have only confined the young person ??? and no more."

Jeffrey says the question is no longer about whether the process works; it is about how best to apply it.

"We talk about locking them up, but that doesn't enable the young person to understand the consequences of what they've done." Nor does it answer the victim's questions or help them to move on. He says restorative justice does both.

"This is the only process that I know can effectively do that."

None of the eight young men involved in this conference have offended since.