In recent days, a parade of white power players has descended on Brooklyn to denounce the Black Lives Matter movement. In dueling press conferences and TV appearances, they have tied protests to riots, riots to criminality, and criminality to economic calamity. In so doing, they have shifted the onus from the police to the policed.

This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Long before broken windows, the partisans of law and order claimed that protests are bound to cause riots, and that riots are bound to cause violent crime and neighborhood decline. In the decades since the urban uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s, the myth of the “riot effect” has been deployed to rationalize the massive expansion of urban police forces and with it, the escalation of policing to the level of low-intensity warfare.

Fifty years after the Watts Rebellion, and more than four months after the first shots were fired in Ferguson, we continue to hear the same refrain. Here is Time: “Can Ferguson Recover? The Lasting Economic Impact of Violent Unrest.” USA Today: “Some Fear Rioting May Seal Ferguson’s Fate for Decades.” And National Review: “Businesses and neighborhoods may never recover from the present anarchy.”