Part of North London exploded in violence over the weekend, after the as-yet unexplained killing of a man by police. A peaceful vigil by the man's family outside a police station turned violent with gangs of youths burning cars, attacking police officers and looting local stores. Now there are questions about why this event exploded and how the police handled it as the rioting continues.
MELISSA BLOCK, host: Fires are breaking out all over London. For three nights now, arson and looting have engulfed neighborhoods in the British capital with hundreds arrested and dozens of police injured. And things only appear to be getting worse.</s>MELISSA BLOCK, host: Similar violence has now erupted in the city of Birmingham, about 120 miles from London. British political leaders are canceling their vacations to return home and deal with the riots.</s>MICHELE NORRIS, host: As Vicki Barker reports, the trouble began when police fatally shot a black man last Thursday.</s>VICKI BARKER: There are conflicting explanations for just how a peaceful protest in the North London suburb of Tottenham turned violent Saturday night. Police are still investigating how 29-year-old local Mark Duggan came to be killed by a unit investigating gun crime in the black community. But Officer Stephen Kavanagh acknowledges the Independent Police Complaints Commission, or IPCC, should have responded more promptly when his family asked for a meeting.</s>STEPHEN KAVANAGH: We've had meetings at a London level and a local level. Actually, we should have helped the IPCC come closer to the family more quickly.</s>ROSIE PERTUSA: There was another neighbor trying to get out of the building, you know, just like in such a panic. And then we go outside and then I saw the building, there are flames going up the building. You know, it was just black smoke coming, billowing down from the corner of the high road.</s>VICKI BARKER: Rosie Pertusa's building burned down after looters set fire to a ground-floor rug store in Saturday night's riots. She and her neighbors lost everything.</s>ROSIE PERTUSA: As we were, like, trying to get out of that building alive, some stupid, selfish man - white guy with blond hair - was coming out, you know, he obviously looted carpet, right? And people were coming out with rugs over their shoulders and laughing.</s>VICKI BARKER: Tottenham was the scene of some of Britain's worst race riots in the 1980s. But London's deputy mayor, Kit Malthouse, says the pictures he's seen show opportunistic acts of looting.</s>KIT MALTHOUSE: There's no coordinated action here. There's no Mr. Big or any kind of sense of protest about this. It's criminality, pure and simple, and we should treat it as that.</s>VICKI BARKER: That's a view shared by many locals. They say community relations in Tottenham are better now. They accuse outsiders of hijacking a political protest.</s>VICKI BARKER: Duggan's family has pleaded for calm. Regardless of how the father of four died, they say they don't want their son's death to be used to justify any more violence or destruction. Louis Fisher(ph) is on the local school board.</s>LOUIS FISHER: We have a very strong community; it's a multinational committee. We've got great kids, great parents. There was no underlying problems that anybody knew about.</s>VICKI BARKER: No underlying problems besides overcrowding, poverty and lack of opportunities for young people, says local Rizwana Hamid. She describes different ethnic and racial groups crammed together with an infrastructure that was insufficient even before budget cuts began to bite.</s>RIZWANA HAMID: That sense of animals being caged in this dense area leads to a boiling up of tensions and an outburst of what we saw the other night.</s>DAVID AKINSANYA: Lots of people have been talking about the cuts and how that affects mainly, you know, single mothers and particularly young people. But I'm sorry, I don't think that is enough excuse for what's been going on.</s>VICKI BARKER: David Akinsanya, a local poet and broadcaster; he's among those who claim bored, young delinquents have been using social media to spread the word and the mayhem to vulnerable neighborhoods.</s>VICKI BARKER: Activist Sharon Grant, pleading for the destruction to stop.</s>SHARON GRANT: Enough is enough, the damage that's been done is already enormous. These are ordinary working-class people that are being affected.</s>VICKI BARKER: But as night fell, there were more riots and fires eating up businesses in more London neighborhoods and beyond. Prime Minister David Cameron has cut short his vacation and will hold a crisis meeting in the morning.</s>VICKI BARKER: For NPR News, I'm Vicki Barker in London.</s>MELISSA BLOCK, host: ALL THINGS CONSIDERED continues in a moment.