Mark Duggan was gunned down by the Metropolitan Police in Tottenham on the evening of August 4, 2011. Law enforcement officials accused Duggan of being part of a gang linked to gun crime and drug dealing, and armed officers carried out an operation that saw them box in the minicab Duggan was travelling in.
The events that transpired were not captured on video, but Duggan, who the police claimed was armed, was shot dead on the scene by armed officers as he stepped out of the vehicle.
On the evening of August 6, roughly 300 people from the local community gathered outside Tottenham police station to demand justice for Mark Duggan and his family.
Stafford Scott, a prominent figure in the local community and campaigner, wrote in The Guardian that originally, the demonstrators were angered that the police had failed to contact Duggan’s family in the two days following his death.
The protests turned violent as bottles were thrown at police cars, which were eventually set alight. The unrest allegedly broke out after police officers began harassing a teenage girl.
Carole Duggan (C), aunt of Mark Duggan who was shot dead by police five years ago, stands with supporters at a gathering outside Tottenham Police Station in London on August 6, 2016, to remember those killed under the control of police.
© AFP 2023 / DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS
By 8 August, the civil unrest had spread to other regions of London, as individuals set fire to cars, property, and began looting stores. Violence also broke out in Liverpool, Birmingham, and Nottingham over the following days.
In all, five people lost their lives, hundreds suffered injuries, and the damage to property was estimated at more than 300 million pounds ($416 million).
More than 1,000 people were jailed for their part in the civil unrest, including Nicholas Robinson, a college student who was sentenced to six months in prison for stealing bottles of water from a local supermarket.
The civil unrest that gripped the United Kingdom 10 years ago is thought to be the worst in a generation, but a decade on, many members of the country’s Black population still say that the underlying economic and racial inequality believed to have led to Mark Duggan’s killing and the discontent that followed still run through society.
Decade-Long Fight For Justice
The question of whether Mark Duggan was armed and fired a gun as police officers attempted to arrest him has been a major point of contention for the past decade.
As the first reports were published by UK media outlets on the evening of August 4, some newspapers alleged that there had been a "shootout" or an "exchange of fire" on the streets of Tottenham.
On 5 August, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) confirmed that a bullet had been lodged in the radio of a police officer participating in the operation to arrest Duggan, furthering speculation that the latter had opened fire on officers.
Four days later, the IPCC published the results of ballistics tests carried out at the scene of the crime, ruling that Duggan, who was said to be carrying a loaded firearm, did not fire any shots at police officers.
Later it was revealed that an illegal firearm was found over a fence, approximately 22 feet from where Duggan was shot dead, and an inquest heard that he may have thrown the weapon over this fence as he was shot.
William Henry, a professor of criminology and sociology at the University of West London, said the initial reporting of events, which saw Duggan labelled as an armed "gangster," contributed to the sense of mistrust many members of the Black community feel toward the police, given the later findings that Duggan was unarmed when he was shot.
"When Mark Duggan was shot, we were told through the mainstream media that he was a violent gangster, etc. However, the crucial piece of information was that he was going for his gun or he had a gun on his person, and all of this was refuted after. So, of course, the communities aren't going to trust the police, why would you?" Henry said.
This view was echoed by Suzella Palmer, a senior lecturer in applied social studies at the University of Bedfordshire, who said that the initial media coverage of Mark Duggan’s death led to some being unwilling to accept that the police acted out of line.
"I think when we’re talking about certain sections of society not willing to acknowledge certain things, I think the media is a driver in that as well, as they present a distorted view to make the victim seem like they brought it on themselves or that the police were justified in their actions," Palmer said.
At an inquest into the killing of Mark Duggan, several officers responding to the incident alleged that Duggan had reached toward the waistband of his trousers as he exited the minicab he was travelling in.
The officers claimed that they believed Duggan was reaching for a gun, justifying their decision to open fire.
In 2014, a jury concluded by a majority of eight to two that the killing of Mark Duggan was lawful.
Duggan’s family has continued to fight for justice, and an appeal was lodged in the High Court. This, along with a civil claim, was rejected.
Mother of Mark Duggan Pam Duggan (L) listens as Carole Duggan (R), aunt of Mark Duggan who was shot dead by police five years ago, addresses a gathering outside Tottenham Police Station in London on August 6, 2016, to remember those killed under the control of police.
© AFP 2023 / DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS
More recently, researchers at Forensic Architecture, an organization based at Goldsmiths, University of London, challenged the initial conclusions that Duggan was in the process of throwing away a firearm as police officers tried to detain him.
The findings were brought to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), the successor to the IPCC, although the office said that the new research would not trigger a reopening of the investigation into Mark Duggan’s death.
"If you think about it, if they say that there is forensic evidence that could shed a different light or complexion on the case, surely it's in the interests of the wider public for that to be made available, because if you think about it, the only reason you wouldn't want that in the public arena is if it basically condemns the original report. That's the only reason you wouldn't want that in the public arena," Professor William Henry of the University of West London said.
Suzella Palmer said that many family members of Black individuals who die at the hands of the police often feel that they are unable to get justice, given that organizations such as the IPCC and the IOPC were far from independent.
"The IOPC is supposed to be the next step towards becoming seen as more independent, but when you look at a lot of the decisions they make, they do not make sense to the families of the victims, and the victims of police brutality that haven’t died," the University of Bedfordshire researcher said.
Palmer also cited the police shooting of Azelle Rodney in 2005 as an example of the UK's failure to jail officers who kill Black individuals while on duty. Despite the Crown Prosecution Service ruling that the officer, Anthony Long, who killed Rodney had "no lawful justification" for doing so, a jury cleared Long of murder.
William Henry also drew parallels with other past incidents, citing the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a Black man who was stabbed to death in 1993 in an unprovoked racist attack. It took almost two decades for two of the perpetrators of the murder to be put behind bars.
"It's exactly the same as with the Stephen Lawrence murder. The police sat on the evidence for decades, knowing that they had a good case against the two people who subsequently were incarcerated for that. When we're talking about systemic or institutionalized racism, we are talking about structural problems, structural concerns," Henry said.
Decrying Disproportionality in Policing, Courts
The police killing of Mark Duggan, and the subsequent findings that he did not open fire at law enforcement officers, raised many questions over the Metropolitan Police’s ability to rebuild trust with Londoners.
In 2014, Sadiq Khan, the then-shadow justice secretary, called for an urgent review of the police’s stop and search powers, particularly as Black and Asian individuals are widely overrepresented in the numbers of individuals law enforcement officers stop on the street to carry out searches.
"When you think about the disproportionality, it just mirrors the disproportionate representation that is within the society anyway. We know, for instance, that Blacks are nine times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched. For Asians it's something like six times more likely," William Henry said.
Henry also noted the disproportionality in the sentencing of individuals who were prosecuted for being involved in the civil unrest that followed the killing of Mark Duggan, as an estimated 45% of those who were prosecuted were either Black or from a mixed-race background, according to Ministry of Justice data.
This degree of unequal treatment can also be found in other criminal cases, Henry said, citing Oxford University student Lavinia Woodward, a white woman who was spared jail for stabbing her partner in 2016 after a judge said that a prison sentence would "damage her career."
"You never hear about that in the context of Blacks and Asians. So, to me, what I don't want us to do is to treat this as some kind of single-focused issue so it's this aspect of the criminal justice system or it's the other. The whole thing for me is that it is embedded throughout all of these social structures, this disproportionality," the University of West London researcher said.
Additionally, Suzella Palmer noted that Black individuals often have little power to challenge the comparatively tougher prison sentences they receive if they have been found guilty.
Criticisms of Conservatives' Stance on Race
The disproportionality in police stop and search operations, and the economic inequality experienced by ethnic minorities in the United Kingdom, have often been viewed as the underlying causes of the civil unrest that followed the police killing of Mark Duggan.
William Henry also noted that the Conservatives, who gained power in 2010 as part of a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, worked to cut many of the educational grants available to Black children immediately after taking power.
"Many of the people who would work with the young people in those local communities in places like Tottenham, they were funded through those sources. With those cuts, they couldn't carry on doing the kind of grassroots community-led work that they were doing," Henry said.
Since 2019, when Boris Johnson led the Conservatives to a sweeping victory over the Labour Party, a number of organizations have accused Tory ministers of racism over their response to the numbers of migrants attempting to cross the English Channel from France, and their criticisms of the English national soccer team for "taking the knee" ahead of games.
William Henry, who cited his own experience of injustice at the hands of the police in the 1970s, noted the increased racial tensions in the United Kingdom at the present time.
"The moment that we're living in now really reminds me of the 1970s. In the 1970s, society was racially charged, it was palpable, it was tangible. And I actually feel like we've gone back to that now," Henry said.
This opinion was shared by Suzella Palmer, who said that Black teenagers in the 2020s were experiencing many of the injustices felt by their counterparts several decades prior.
Both researchers also noted the racism experienced by Black English individuals who were born in the United Kingdom and whose parents were born in the country as well.
Palmer said that many of these people are still made to feel as if they do not belong in the United Kingdom, and Henry said that it was ironic that the Conservatives have pushed a racially charged narrative when Johnson was born in the United States.
"For me, the supreme irony about the moment that we live in, is we've got a champion and a bastion of Englishness and Britishness – Boris Johnson, the prime minister, who 1), wasn't even born here … and 2) in 2002, in that piece he wrote for The Spectator, said Africa should be recolonized, and this time we shouldn't feel guilty, and the Queen loves the Commonwealth because it furnishes her with these 'piccaninnies' with their 'watermelon smiles'," Henry said.
In March of this year, the UK government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, headed by Tony Sewell, published a report claiming that there was no institutional racism in the United Kingdom.
Suzella Palmer said that the Conservative government appointed Sewell, who himself is Black, to this position because they knew that he would draw this conclusion, one which served the party’s interests.
"They purposely picked people who they knew were going to produce a report that showed the outcomes that a Tory right-wing racist government would want to portray. Anybody who is familiar with Sewell’s work and a lot of people that were involved in that knew what the outcomes were going to be. I identified Tony Sewell as somebody who does not speak for the Black community and if anything, a lot of what he says is detrimental to the Black community," the University of Bedfordshire researcher said.
William Henry said that the publication of Sewell’s report underlines the government's attempts to delegitimize any notion of victimhood that Black people can hold, irrespective of the treatment they receive in society.
"If you can say that society isn't systemically or institutionally racist, then what that means is, members of the Black community embrace this notion of victimhood that really has no merit because the evidence and the research in Tony Sewell's report speak to the contrary," Henry remarked, adding that these "confusions and conflicts" worked to deflect society from having the "real discussions" over what it means to be the "victim of a racist society."
Ten years on, Mark Duggan’s family continues to seek justice for their son. In doing so, they join the families of dozens of Black individuals who were murdered at the hands of the police or died in police custody.
Parm Sandhu, a former senior Metropolitan Police officer, said in June that her time in the UK capital’s police service was marred by "institutional racism," a narrative that runs counter to much of Boris Johnson and his ministers say in parliament.