The Truce, by Karen Umemoto, chronicles a gang war in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Oakwood that occurred between 1993 and 1994. Umemoto states that her “central concern” is “the relatively quick process through which rather harmonious social relations across racial boundaries are overcome by racial tensions and distancing, which set in place a more fractured pattern of race relations” (p. 5). The book, then, is primarily an analysis of the complex and changing dynamics of racial conflict, and the author uses the gang war to explore that conflict.

The Truce is divided into eight chapters that address different aspects of the gang war, including two chapters on how law enforcement and other officials reacted to the gang war, and one dealing with the mediation process that occurred within the community. Umemoto conducted 58 formal interviews with individuals involved in various aspects of the events studied. She also used a diverse mix of documentary sources, including government reports, newspaper accounts, and census data, to support her claims. Although both the publisher and author describe the book as ethnography, the author's research methods are more similar to a traditional case study because of her reliance on multiple data sources. This is not intended to be a criticism, but rather a description of Umemoto's methodology. Urban ethnography brings to mind recent works like Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave or Scott Cummings' Left Behind in Rosedale, both of which provide firsthand detailed accounts of tragic individuals and events in disadvantaged neighborhoods. The Truce is a different kind of book and, in my view, provides more distance from the subject matter than was likely intended by the author. Within the context of her case study, Umemoto combines both traditional positivist social science research methods with postmodern analysis of how individuals interpret the meanings of events. The author is well aware of the theoretical tension between these two approaches and addresses this issue in a lengthy footnote in Chapter 1. Umemoto's combination of theoretical perspectives provides for an interesting yet, at times, problematic synthesis.

Perhaps the most important contribution of this book is the development and application of the concept of “morphing” to help explain the dynamic nature of racial conflict. The metaphor of morphing, which Umemoto consciously borrows from technology first developed in the visual arts, is used to refer to the transformation of a conflict over time, which “includes the ebb and flow of racial and other lines of division in the evolution of conflict as well as the substance and forms of contestation as they alter over the course of interaction” (p. 5). This concept seems intuitively useful in explaining conflict among disadvantaged groups and could be usefully applied in other settings. Several factors—the multiracial, multiethnic setting for the gang war, with the additional complications posed by gentrification; the changing economic structure of the area; poor community relations with law enforcement—created a backdrop in which several different types of conflicts could develop. Thus the concept of morphing begins to get at an important truth about the fluidity of individual attitudes and describes how assigning blame can change over time, depending both on the specific position of the observer as well as external events.

Heavy-handed police tactics, which Umemoto describes in detail, not only failed to stop the gang war but initially corresponded with an increase in gang violence and fueled speculation among many residents that there was a police conspiracy at work. Thus one of Umemoto's main arguments is that law enforcement would have been more successful in dealing with the gang war if there had been more of a dialogue up front among the various gangs and constituencies. She discusses in some detail how many different individuals and groups within the neighborhood, including gang members themselves and law enforcement and other government officials, worked to facilitate peace among warring gangs. Through her description of how the conflict morphed into a race war, Umemoto implies that the conflict could have gone in a very different direction if events were both interpreted differently by residents and reported differently by the media. Much of the book's last chapter is devoted to an argument in favor of truly collaborative problem solving, and the author explicitly links this approach to a broader discussion of democratic decision making.

The normative aspect of The Truce, therefore, is primarily about the process of decision making. Umemoto argues for the “creation of inclusive settings for a fuller deliberation of policies and practices” (p. 195), with the implication that the creation of such settings would necessarily create policies better able to address community problems. Yet one of the book's main empirical findings—that an emphasis on an increase in law enforcement was not the best way to quell the gang war—is potentially at odds with Umemoto's process-based recommendations. What about the citizens both inside and outside the neighborhood who were in favor of a law and order strategy to address the problem? It is not clear how the inclusive process of decision making that Umemoto advocates would handle this perspective or other perspectives on the gang war that are at odds with her main empirical findings. The inclusion of multiple perspectives is, to be sure, an important aspect of policy making in a democracy. Ultimately, government officials have to make decisions about which policy to implement, and within a context of crime, poverty, and racial and socioeconomic tensions, an inclusive process alone will not necessarily lead to the most effective policy solutions and could, depending on the context, make for policy stalemate. Despite these comments, The Truce by Karen Umemoto is a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions involving urban racial and ethnic conflict as well as criminal justice policy, and the story she tells is one that urban scholars in political science need to hear.