LONDON, ENGLAND — London is burning. The pomp and ceremony of the royal wedding long forgotten, for several days London has been under attack from some of its own inhabitants, as violent rioting has spread from North to South, East to West.

The violence — sparked by the killing of Jamaican-British man, Mark Duggan by police last week — has even spread far beyond London as young people have taken to the streets in other major cities like Birmingham and Bristol.

Buildings have been burned down, shopping centers looted, police and firemen attacked. People are afraid for their lives and their livelihoods; Londoners are now angrily calling for the army to step in and a state of emergency to be declared.

The shooting of 29-year-old Mark Duggan on Thursday August 2nd was the catalyst for this violence. Duggan was shot and killed in Tottenham, a deprived part of North London with a large Black population by a specialist unit of London’s police force called Operation Trident.

Operation Trident which was set up in 1998 to specifically deal with gun crime related to drug activity within London’s Black community — is itself controversial among some sections of the Black community. Even though Trident was set up by Black activists to tackle so-called black-on-black killings, few of the police officers within the unit are Black, and some see Trident as being just another way in which the police can oppress young Black men who are already disproportionately targeted for criminal behavior.

Mark Duggan’s death seemed to touch a raw nerve, coming just months after another controversial police-related death of another Black man, a British reggae artist known as Smiley Culture. A peaceful protest about Duggan’s death turned violent. From then on, the violence has escalated.