By Will Bland

Smashing shop windows, stealing sports shoes and setting fire to buses is an unusual way to express your solidarity with a mother whose son was shot by the police.

London’s shoe thieves and bus burners haven’t been giving interviews to the press, but, as someone who grew up in London, I doubt that I’d enjoy hearing their excuses, particularly if they mentioned Mark Duggan, the 29-year-old who was shot last week.

Britain, like most societies, struggles to provide equal opportunities for all its citizens, and its police forces sometimes make serious mistakes, but it’s shocking when we have to explain senseless violence as the outcome of genuine injustices.  

 Of course, if Duggan hadn’t been shot on Friday, London streets wouldn’t have been looted on Sunday, but the shooting didn't exactly cause the riots and society's failings don't excuse the rioters.    

When people start asking whether the riots could have been avoided, some are bound to blame the politicians and the police. That seems wrong. The police could probably have been more effective arresting rioters, but the rioters are to blame for the riot. 

For those people whose communities aren’t being looted, the impulse is to see signs of a dysfunctional society; to assume that the riots were somehow inevitable.

It’s different when it’s your hometown. Watching video footage of men hurling chairs against London shop windows, it's not a dysfunctional society that I see, but a place that I recognise and individuals making their own choices.     

When I’ve heard about riots outside Britain –Los Angeles, France, China, the Middle East– I’ve assumed that the rioters had some legitimacy; people don’t normally burn cars, there must be with a problem with societies when they do. 

Watching the riots in my own city, I’ve become angry at the rioters, not the police, politicians, schools or any of the other institutions that underpin British society.

However, similar acts of violence elsewhere have convinced me of, for example, racial prejudice in California, inequality in France’s suburbs or the neglect of migrant workers in southern China. 

When Nicolas Sarkozy blamed his country’s 2005 riots on “gangsters”, I assumed that the French politician was part of the problem – dismissing the grievances of black youths and instead hoping that aggression would end their protests.

Of course, not all riots are the same. In London, it’s important to stress that Duggan’s family have condemned the violence and I haven’t seen any public sympathy for the rioters.

Watching faraway riots on television, it’s easy to pity oppressed foreigners whose lives seem so miserable that violence is the only means of escape. It’s not easy to understand the choice that those “miserable people” face between attacking an imperfect society or trying to overcome the injustices peacefully.

It is a choice though, and in Britain's case, the fact that a few hundred young Londoners picked the first option while most of their neighbors watched in horror, is an indictment of the rioters than the society that they attacked.