Protesting works. Rioting doesn’t.

In 2005 a pair of researchers looked at the urban riots of the 1960s. They found that the riots depressed the value of black-owned properties over the decade, with little recovery in the decade after. Meanwhile, they calculated that there was as much as a 10 percent loss in the value of black-owned residential property.

Their paper reminds me of a reporting project I did from Baltimore in 2018, where I covered a surge in homicides and the community efforts to reduce them. Following the death of a man named Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015, many thousands of people marched peacefully to petition their local officials for an investigation. But a much smaller group of people took advantage of the resulting turmoil to engage in rioting and looting; after a number of pharmacies were broken into, drugs flooded the underground market, helping fuel the city’s public-health problems and homicide numbers.

The evidence seems clear: Nonviolent protests serve to unite people and build sympathy, while riots fuel division and distrust by destroying the economy, endangering people’s lives, and empowering authoritarian, law-and-order political forces. (In the current COVID-19 environment, rioting presents a particular danger.)