Policing and Social Media: Social Control in an Era of New Media

turn, some riots lasted forty or fifty minutes before they could be stopped. The author describes one brawl that involved twentysix students and took between twenty and thirty Oakland police officers using their nightsticks on students before order could be restored. From the start, it is clear that readers have an extremely intelligent, thoughtful, and skilled author guiding them through this subject, and he may genuinely know more about ethnic violence in high schools than anyone else in the field. Given his expertise, it is natural that Sánchez-Jankowski would attempt to draw several broad conclusions in the final section of the book. For instance, he emphasizes that ethnic conflict appears most likely when a large number of newcomers enter a school and significantly alter its demographics. In such cases, the specific ethnicities of the newcomer group and the established group may matter less than the established group’s perception that this intrusion represents an existential threat. Notably, however, whether this ingroupoutgroup conflict leads to verbal aggression or to overt violence seems correlated with other social and structural factors, such as whether the school is primarily composed of middleor lower-class students. Although many of the author’s conclusions may be correct, skeptics may wonder whether a few are speculative in nature and not fully supported by this study itself. For example, Sánchez-Jankowski suggests that administrators at middle-class schools are not more effective at preventing conflict than administrators at lower-class schools, but that empirical question could be more reliably answered by studying cases where administrators actually changed schools. Along similar lines, the author attempts to explain why middle-class schools are typically less violent than lower-class schools by briefly analyzing differences in the students themselves, their attitudes toward violence, their parental influences, and the structural forces that act on them. However, this is an exceedingly complex question that could be the subject of its own entire book. Finally, Sánchez-Jankowski’s conclusion that no specific ethnic group is more prone to being victims or victimizers due to its cultural traits may be consistent with the racial invariance hypothesis, but it seems hard to imagine that every group’s cultural traits are exactly equal in promoting or inhibiting violence. Overall, Burning Dislike is a valuable contribution to contemporary understandings of racial and ethnic violence in high schools. Although there are more deadly types of school violence, such as school shootings, ethnic violence appears considerably more common and ultimately more socially destructive. Whereas school shootings are isolated incidents for which only a single perpetrator is typically responsible, the types of individual violence, group violence, brawls, riots, and stampedes described in this book often lead to hundreds of students committing acts of violence and can create multi-generational legacies of deeply held racial biases and animosities towards other groups. As Sánchez-Jankowski skillfully demonstrates, it is important to stamp out these fires before they spread.