If the revelation has puzzled outsiders, it has confused Britons no less. The mood here is a mixture of rage, fear and bafflement. Not that we’re not used to riots: We are. England caught fire during that other royal-wedding year, 1981. But 30 years ago, the battle lines were relatively clear. Race was central, especially in the predominantly black south London neighborhood of Brixton. The target then was a police force charged with racial bias. But the recent explosions have had none of that clarity.

Even though the troubles ignited last week after the police killing of a black Briton in the north London area of Tottenham, the copycat outbursts since have lacked that racial dimension. Among the looters, all races have been represented, while their targets have not been overtly political. They have not hurled stones at police stations, city halls or the Houses of Parliament. Instead, these rapidly mobilized crowds have concentrated their fire on stores, especially those selling cellphones, sneakers and large-screen TVs. One looter was seen trying on different pairs of shoes, making sure she stole the right size.

The Guardian’s Zoe Williams has called these the “shopping riots,” noting the way the mobs move from malls to main street stores, avoiding confrontation with the police, in contrast with the 1981 rioters, who actively sought it. If today’s looters have a political point to make, it is that politics doesn’t matter.

I walked the length of Tottenham High Road on Wednesday, as demolition crews removed what was left of the large carpet store burned to ash on Saturday. I listened to Mohammed Abdi, a Somali-born cellphone store owner whose life’s work was destroyed that night. “It took an age to build this business — and now I have nothing,” he told me. The local member of parliament, David Lammy, was doing his best to hug and reassure those whose neighborhood was ravaged. “The consumerist and materialist nature of it is new,” he said. “And it’s of this generation.”

The methods are new, too: using instant-messaging technology to assemble a crowd; diverting police to one place by, say, burning a car; and then, once law enforcement is safely distracted, starting looting in another. The fact that the police cannot be everywhere at once has proved their Achilles heel, making them all but powerless. The short-term remedy has been to triple the number of police on duty in London, which restored calm here Tuesday night but which is no more a long-term solution than the pleas for BlackBerryto turn off its instant-messenger system. One Tottenham resident warned Wednesday that the rest of the world should brace for the spread of this new “social criminality.”