Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man, was shot dead on Thursday, August 4, by police officers in Tottenham, a largely black and impoverished suburb of northeast London.  Duggan was a member of the Star Gang, which has a reputation for carrying guns and dealing in hard drugs, and his apprehension was preplanned.  It was originally claimed he had fired first, although now it seems both shots were fired by the police.

His death was followed by an incandescent protest outside the Tottenham police station on the subsequent Saturday, and that night decades-old tensions between blacks and the police (called “the Feds” by many blacks) burst literally into flames—with large-scale rioting, looting, and arson breaking out in Tottenham, Hackney, and Dalston, and south of the river in Brixton.  (All of these areas are heavily black.)  The rioting awoke awful memories of 1985, when white policeman Keith Blakelock was murdered by a black mob hereabouts.

Over Sunday and Monday, rioting and looting spread to other parts of London and to Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, and elsewhere.  Monday, August 8, was the busiest night in the London Fire Brigade’s 146-year history—the Blitz included.

From having been essentially a black riot with ostensibly political causes, as experienced fairly frequently before, the “protests” became a more diffuse affair, as thieves of all races availed of the mayhem to plunder shops, ultraleftists furthered global revolution, and ethnic groups banded together to protect themselves.  The greatest tragedy was in Birmingham, where three Asian men defending their shops were run down and killed deliberately by a car, and there were other murders in Croydon, south London, and Ealing in west London.

It was an extreme level of violence that has sent genuine shockwaves across society—including a complacent political class that had recently been reveling in similar outbreaks of exuberance in Arab countries.  As of August 16, nearly 3,000 people have been arrested, and magistrates’ courts in some areas have been sitting overnight and over weekends to cope with the backlog.  The disturbances have been tamped down by intensive policing; by Tuesday, there were no fewer than 16,000 police on London’s streets, drawn from as far away as Scotland and the West Country.  Police remain on high alert for further outbreaks, especially racial tensions in Birmingham and London, and for what the media insist on referring to as “vigilantes.”

The hunt is now on, not just to locate and punish the malefactors, but to find explanations or excuses.  Reasons proffered to date include police methods, poverty, substandard education, unemployment, spending cuts, consumerism, race, racism, “feral youth,” “gangsta rap,” lack of fathers, alienation, amorality, that journalistic cliché “mindless violence”—and Blackberry, whose £175 handsets were toted by many of the allegedly poverty-stricken “protestors.”

The self-described “contrarian Tory” historian David Starkey may have sunk his broadcasting career by saying on BBC TV’s Newsnight that “the whites have become black” and that Enoch Powell’s direful 1968 predictions had been partly vindicated.  Figures about Afro-Caribbean involvement in the riots are highly sensitive and will probably not be forthcoming—although most TV footage and eyewitness reports suggest it was heavily disproportionate.

Prime Minister David Cameron returned early from holiday and recalled Parliament to deal with this “sick” and “broken Britain.”  He claimed the initial police response had been inadequate and announced the employment of former New York City police chief Bill Bratton as a consultant on gang crime—a move that has made the relationship between police and the government, which wants to cut policing expenditure by 20 percent, even frostier.

On August 15, Cameron made a speech designed to appeal to both populists and liberals.  He denounced the “slow motion moral collapse” over recent generations and said there was a need for a “concerted, all-out war on gangs and gang culture.”  He added that bankers and politicians had set a bad example, and promised more intervention in the affairs of 120,000 “troubled families.”  This might seem a relatively nuanced response, but similar promises have been made by previous governments, and few have had any measurable effect.  The wider public has offered characteristically robust suggestions, which range from expelling rioters from council housing to using them for Army target practice—but this is mere safety-valve activity, devised chiefly to sell newspapers.

For now, all the perplexed majority can do is take comfort in darkly comic anecdotes—such as the story of the clothes-shop owner who reported that her designer-label stock had been rifled, but the thieves had left “all the tasteful things.”  We can comfort ourselves we are not as gormless as the female Barnaby Rudges drinking looted wine in the street at 9:30 a.m.: “It’s the governmen’s fault.  The Conserva’ives, Yeah, wha’ever it is . . . who it is.  I dunno.”  We can shake our heads in wonderment at the Manchester woman who claimed indignantly that her 13-year-old son was innocent of looting—even though she could not answer the reporter’s killer question, “So why did he have a hammer strapped to his leg?”

But even as we are smiling and sweeping up, we all find ourselves looking anxiously over our shoulders, waiting edgily for the next installment.