Even prior to the riots, there was news that unrest was bubbling up. Police had been aggressively patting down youths, most of them black, in areas of London that had seen hard economic times and even harder recently with the unemployment rate for those under 26 hovering around 20%

I decided to contact Jonathan Haynes, web news editor at the Guardian and Dave Wyllie, independent journalist in the UK, to understand more about a particular shooting that took place, which from reading recent articles in Tottenham seemed to point to a spark for demonstrations.