“One of the reasons why the riots of April 27th were able to spread and to sustain themselves into the night is that, like other recent riots, they caught police off-guard. Heeding the call to “purge” that circulated on social media, large numbers of high-school kids turned out in the streets of Mondawmin to fling rocks at police. From here the riot expanded, from rock-throwing to looting stores and burning cop cars—too many kids for the police to handle. As Baltimore City Police Commissioner Anthony Batts admitted bluntly, “they just outnumbered us and outflanked us.” This follows a recent trend of loosely coordinated “flash robs,” where groups of usually 20-or-more teens enter convenience stores or retail shops en masse to ransack merchandise. These have occurred over the past few years in Chicago, Portland, DC, Las Vegas, Jacksonville, and Houston.”