Beyond Policing: How Streetcorner Mediators Keep the Peace Without State Violence

Title: Beyond Policing: How Streetcorner Mediators Keep the Peace Without State Violence

Abstract:

How do we produce safety in places where trust, stability, and institutional support have collapsed? This talk introduces the concept of streetcorner mediation—a new model of public safety that has quietly emerged on some of America’s toughest blocks. Instead of relying on armed enforcement, this approach deploys trained, unarmed practitioners—most of them formerly incarcerated—to calm conflict, care for vulnerable residents, and sustain order through presence and relationships. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, I show how streetcorner mediators have generated striking reductions in crime and disorder through non-coercive means. Their success challenges prevailing frameworks like collective efficacy and procedural justice, which presume a base level of trust and cohesion among “decent” residents and/or the presence of state coercion. Streetcorner mediation begins where those conditions are absent, revealing how safety can be built from scratch through the slow accumulation of reciprocity, recognition, and moral obligation—a process I describe as social debt. Taken together, these insights point toward a reimagined concept of public safety—one rooted not in coercion or surveillance, but in human connection and care.