That summer, in August 2011, a mixed-race man named Mark Duggan was shot dead by police officers in Tottenham Hale, North London. The police claimed that Duggan had shot first, but locals were skeptical. In the words of Martin Sylvester Brown, a member of a Haringey youth group, “Even if you didn’t know him, you know nobody shoots at the police in Tottenham. You know, we’ve got, we’ve got a history.”¹¹⁵

Stafford Scott, a civil rights campaigner in the community, said that a group of around fifty or so—among them Simone, the mother of Mark’s children, along with friends and family from Mark’s estate—marched to the police station. They carried simple banners, but didn’t chant.¹¹⁶ All they wanted was confirmation that Mark had actually been killed—information the police still hadn’t provided. Instead, they were given the cold shoulder and told this was a matter for the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

Outside a crowd gathered—the BBC reported that three hundred people had joined in the march¹¹⁷—and a couple of kids started throwing vegetables at two parked police cars. Though there were officers nearby, they kept their distance. More protesters arrived.

The estate in Tottenham that Mark lived on, Broadwater Farm, had been the site of intense rioting in 1985 after the deaths of Cynthia Jarrett and Cherry Groce—both after police raids. Tottenham, one of the most diverse areas of London, had remained one of the country’s poorest since, with the highest rate of unemployment in London. Trust between police and the community was thin, and officers would later use this to justify their standoff as shops and vehicles burned.

The protests outside Tottenham Police Station soon spread across Haringey as the Carpetright building on the high road was set alight, police vehicles gasoline-bombed, and a retail park looted. The next evening, the riots spread to Enfield, Wood Green, and Dalston, neighboring areas with large black and minority ethnic populations disproportionately targeted by the police (in Dalston, July 2017, twenty-year-old Rashan Charles would die after being chased by police officers into a convenience store and pinned to the ground, prompting more protests).

By the third night, the rioting had spread to cities all over the country, from Bristol and Birmingham to Leeds and Liverpool, its motives now unconnected—at least directly—to Mark Duggan’s shooting. Over the next two nights, ten thousand more police officers were deployed on British streets with orders to adopt a strict “zero-tolerance” approach, and the riots died down.

As they did, courtrooms across the country filled with offenders—mainly young, almost entirely male, and most likely not white—while politicians rushed to put their spin on what had happened.