When Oscar Grant was shot by transit cop Johannes Mehserle in Oakland in the early hours of January 1, 2009, a week passed with no institutional response, while videos of Grant’s murder spread on YouTube like a prairie fire. Then people rebelled, rioted, and took over the streets of Oakland twice—on January 7 and January 14—and just like that, and with the threat of another rebellion hanging heavily in the air, the mayor and the governor leaned on the Alameda County district attorney to bring charges.

When Mike Brown was gunned down by Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014, the community exploded in massive and sustained resistance on the streets. Aside from galvanizing public opinion and sparking a national movement against white supremacist policing, this street insurgency first forced the replacement of Ferguson PD by the St. Louis County Sheriff, and later bythe  state Highway Patrol, as well as prompting both a federal investigation and a grand jury considering—but ultimately rejecting—Wilson’s indictment for murder.

And when Freddie Gray died on April 19, 2015, after a week in a coma provoked by Baltimore City Police, we all know what happened next: in a wave of resistance rivaling Ferguson in the national attention it garnered, Black youth across Baltimore responded as directly as possible to those terrorizing their communities, in some cases chasing the “forces of order” out with bricks. After nearly a week of resistance—including the occupation of Baltimore by heavily-armed National Guard—Maryland state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby stepped into the fray, announcing charges against six officers and admitting that her hand had been forced by the streets: “To the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across America: I heard your call for ‘No justice, no peace.’”

Riots work. But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement. In their zealousness, however, scripted motives can slip out, as with Wolf Blitzer’s bullying of Ferguson organizer DeRay McKesson on live television. Blitzer insisted no fewer than five times that McKesson denounce the rebellions, only to show his hand with the words—astounding from a so-called “journalist”—“I just want to hear you say…”

While the mainstream media—and CNN in particular—has sought to uphold a narrative of nonviolence, it simultaneously carried water for a brutal Baltimore City Police Department, which is after all the only force in question guilty of taking a human life (indeed many). Via twitter, the Baltimore City PD disseminated a counterinsurgency narrative that the media unhesitatingly parroted: first that the riots were sparked by “outsiders,” and when that narrative fell unsurprisingly flat, that those involved were—in the quickly-retracted words of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake—“thugs.” (Bear in mind that BCPD Commissioner Anthony Batts is an outside agitator if ever there was one, who not long ago imposed racist and unconstitutional gang injunctions and curfews in Oakland, as well as apparently being a repeat domestic abuser.)

In fact, the now-dominant claim that Freddie Gray was attempting to injure himself in the police van only reached the Washington Post through a sort of perverse game of telephone: a police affidavit attesting to the alleged statements of an anonymous inmate. That the Post printed such a dubious and circuitous claim—one contradicted by medical evidence, investigative journalism, and the anonymous source himself—is a testament to the putridity of the paper’s standards. (I won’t even address the asinine media narrative surrounding a so-called “purge.”)

Perhaps most revealing was the police response to a citywide truce between the Bloods, Crips, and Black Guerrilla Family. What would seem to be an unambiguously good thing was quickly denounced by BCPD in a misleading (read: mendacious) statement declaring the truce a “credible threat” and suggesting that gang members had teamed up to “take-out” police. This last phrase, which appears in quotation marks in the police statement, was never attributed to an actual source, and for a very simple reason: because it was a fabrication that gang members immediately denounced. This was not a poor decision by Baltimore Police, but instead a well-worn strategy: the LAPD said exactly the same thing when Bloods and Crips declared a truce in 1992, and then they did everything they could to “sabotage and undermine the truce.”

Riots work, so why do so many well-meaning voices continue to insist that they don’t? The argument that they harm communities makes intuitive sense, but doesn’t hold up to serious scrutiny: the Maryland Insurance Commission has estimated the uninsured losses from the riots to be a paltry $1 million. Meanwhile, foreclosures from the recession cost Baltimore $1.5 billion (with a B) from 2008-2010, and $13.6 million in tax revenue in 2010 alone. And as many are quick to point out, the city has paid out more than $5.7 million to settle police abuse lawsuits since 2011. The police—not to mention capitalism—have done far more to damage Baltimore than any riot could.

Some insist that riots only provide a ready-made image to the media that emphasizes the “negative” over the “positive” (meaning the “violent” over the “peaceful”). But this view has little to say about whether so-called “peaceful” protests are effective in bringing attention to police murder, offering instead a moral imperative: the media should cover peaceful marches, the system should respond. But they don’t, and it doesn’t, and if so-called peaceful tactics don’t bring change, then they lose their status as a “positive” alternative, and even become complicit in continued systemic violence.

Tragic facts are facts nonetheless: we aren’t talking about Baltimore—and we weren’t talking about Ferguson—simply because Freddie Gray and Mike Brown were killed there. In a system built upon the death of Black bodies, such death is not newsworthy. #Baltimore and #Ferguson are trending hashtags because they are places where people decided they had had enough, and took over the streets to transmit that message in no uncertain terms. While riots can undeniably win concrete concessions, it is this demonstration effect that matters most, despite being more long-term and difficult to measure, making Ferguson a catalyst for militant resistance nationwide. No matter how much we try to convince ourselves that history moves forward gradually in that inevitable tendency we like to call “progress,” the reality has always been more erratic and jarring, combative and conflictive, driven by just this sort of militancy against all odds.