In August 2011, riots took place in towns and cities across England, sparked by the police shooting and killing of Mark Duggan on 4 August. An already tense situation erupted when members of a peaceful protest march on 6 August, involving Duggan's friends and family, became disillusioned with police responses to their requests for senior officers to provide them with information about what happened during the shooting. Those requests fell on deaf ears. Rioting and looting took place in Tottenham that evening and then spread to other parts of London in the following days and other towns and cities after that. By 15 August, more than 3000 people had been arrested, with more than 1000 criminal charges issued in relation to the riots.

Many prominent politicians and media commentators were quick to highlight that structural causes such as poverty, unemployment and racism were not to blame in any way for the riots. The then Home Secretary Theresa May highlighted the ‘violent gang culture [that] exists in so many of our towns and cities’ and argued that ‘the only cause of a crime is a criminal’ (May, 2011). The Justice Secretary Ken Clarke (2011) stated in a column for the Guardian that what he ‘found most disturbing was the sense that the hardcore of rioters came from a feral underclass, cut off from the mainstream in everything but its materialism’. The Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips (2011) argued that not only were the children feral, but so were their parents. The prime minister at the time, David Cameron (2011a), in a ‘fightback speech’ following the end of the riots, pre-empted the findings of any future inquiries, stating: