Peace and Safety

The district spends $2.3m a year on antisocial-behavior enforcement and $41,000 on mediation. The ratio is not the result of a decision anyone made. It is what happens when one budget line has a statutory basis and the other has to be argued for annually.

What mediation actually resolves

The district’s mediation service, which runs on one and a half posts, handled 188 referrals last year.

• 71% closed with an agreement between the parties.
• 6% escalated to enforcement.
• Average cost per case: $218.

The comparable enforcement route averages $2,900 per case and produces an agreement in no meaningful sense — it produces compliance, or it produces a repeat referral.

Three commitments

1. Mediation first for every neighbor dispute referral, unless there is a safety reason not to.
2. Six posts, not one and a half, funded from the enforcement line, which is where the savings appear.
3. An annual published comparison of cost and outcome for both routes, so the argument is settled with numbers rather than instinct.

Enforcement is what you do when mediation has failed. Doing it first is not being tough. It is being expensive.

The harder part

Mediation only works where people trust the mediator, and trust is built ward by ward. That is why this is organized as a movement — twenty-six trained volunteer mediators, drawn from the wards they work in, is a slower way to build a service and the only way to build one that gets used.