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 streetcorner mediation, an emerging model of public safety operating on some of America’s most challenged blocks. Rather than relying on armed enforcement, the model deploys trained, unarmed practitioners—many formerly incarcerated—to calm conflict, support vulnerable residents, and sustain order through everyday presence and relationships. Drawing on multiple years of ethnographic fieldwork, I show how these mediators reduce crime and disorder through non-coercive means. Their success challenges prevailing frameworks such as collective efficacy, which assume a baseline of trust and cohesion among residents. Streetcorner mediation begins where those conditions are absent, revealing how safety can be built from scratch through the gradual accumulation of reciprocity, recognition, and obligation—a process I describe as social debt.

Bio:

Forrest Stuart is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, where he directs the Program on Urban Studies and the Stanford Ethnography Lab. A 2020 MacArthur Fellow, his research examines the causes, contours, and consequences of urban poverty. He is the author of Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row and Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy.