It seems to have died down in London (10k more officers will do that) however the damage has been done and has spread across to other cities.
My area was looted and cars burnt just after the tottenham riots and looting of tottenham hale retail park, many incidents have not been reported on because they weren't very serious and all the news stations only had unconfirmed reports.
It's just opportunism, people knew the police couldn't handle the riots so how were they going to handle mobs of people looting everything and they went on a looting spree. People caught on and it just carried on until today when the MET finally woke up and deployed 16k police officers.
I saw people running down my street with armfuls of cloths, electronics etc. throwing them into their cars and running back to grab some more, this happened from 12 midnight till 6am in the morning because the police kept telling us they didn't have enough officers to send down, but at least nobody's home or business was burned down unlike in croydon and clapham (south london).
Edit: Just read SeiB's post and here's what happend for anyone wondering:
A man was shot dead in north london (tottenham) around a week ago. The circumstances surrounding his death was suspicious and unclear. The dead man's family and a group of peaceful protesters marched to tottenham police station and waited approximately 3-4 hours for an answer by the police (an answer regarding why the man was killed as they did not believe the man had fired at police officers as told on the news).
After waiting for so long the mothers and the family of the dead man went home and by that time more youths had gathered to show their support, as the adults and the family were leaving tensions flared with the youngsters because they were angry that no police officers came out to talk to them.
As this tension was rising the police (predicting a riot) gathered to disperse the locals, when a 16-17 year old girl was reported to have been hit by police officers with batons and apparently seeing this the locals kicked off and the riot began, torching two police cars and a bus.
Obviously seeing this as an opportunity with police stretched thin around north london, looting began in tottenham retail park and spread across to my area. From there this just escalated to vandalism/arson and looting in other areas and reached all the way down the south london so all this definitely had no involvement with the tottenham riot, which can be seen by looting and riots happening at birmingham / bristol / liverpool / leeds / kent / nottingham and so on.
So this wasn't something related to tottenham or Mark Duggan, people saw an opportunity and took it, too many people talking bollocks on the the telly about how this is political or it's because the of some kind of economic or what ever they are using to cover it up.
To make matters worse the IPCC (independent police complaints commission) who was investigating the death as police said the man had fired upon them, said today that the gun found in the area had not been fired and the 2 bullets, one which killed and stayed in the man and the other which passed through him and hit the police radio were both police rounds.
