CLEARLY we haven’t heard the last of the finding that the shooting dead of Mark Duggan was not unlawful.

Nonetheless, it is regrettable that he was shot by a Metropolitan Police officer in August 2011. The circumstances at the time were chaotic and there was enormous doubt about whether Duggan was about to shoot or not.

In such conditions, it is highly likely that mistakes were made and, given the benefit of hindsight, the confrontation might have been handled differently and better. But a fast-moving police operation to capture a criminal known for his instability and inclination to violence is not a sedate and measured operation like a game of chess. Decisions involving life and death have to be made in the heat and confusion of the moment.

The suspect raises his hand. Is that a gun there? You know he has one. Could this be the last three seconds of your life as a husband and father?

In the eight years before his death, Mr Duggan was repeatedly arrested for serious crimes, including murder, attempted murder and firearms offences. Despite this, his mother Pamela maintains he was a “lovely young boy” who tried to keep the peace. Against this, Duggan was photographed with his arms draped affectionately around Junior Cameron and Darrell Albert, gangster colleagues who are presently serving life for murder and attempted murder.

His mother told the inquest that, as an infant, Mr Duggan was shy and clingy but at the age of 12 he was sent to stay with his aunt Carole, in Manchester, because his behaviour in secondary school had become disruptive.

Aged 17, he returned to Tottenham and fathered six children by different women.

In court, the coroner Keith Cutler asked the jury to consider: “Was he, in fact, someone who was sliding into criminal ways or was he a confirmed serious criminal?”

Detective Chief Inspector Mick Foote, from the Metropolitan Police’s gang crime unit, Trident, said Mr Duggan was a “confrontational and violent” member of Tottenham Man Dem, a mob associated with drug dealing, violence and gang warfare.

The Man Dems have a long and notorious history going back to the time of the murder of PC Keith Blakelock, in 1985, and the first series of Tottenham riots. Chief Inspector Foote said Mr Duggan was one of the 48 most violent criminals in Europe, and in 2011 he was one of the targets of a police operation called Dibri which was focusing on a spike in gun-related incidents in nightclubs.

The officer told the inquest there was intelligence that Mr Duggan had shot someone in a nightclub and, on another occasion, fired a gun in a club car park. He was once treated in hospital for a gunshot wound to his foot.

He had twice been picked up after allegedly travelling in cars where ammunition and a gun were found. But Chief Insp Foote added he was “very lightly convicted”. Minor offences, such as cannabis possession and the sale of stolen goods, were the only convictions on his record. According to the coroner, there was “very strong evidence” that on August 4, 2011, Mr Duggan, being followed by police, collected a gun from a man called Kevin Hutchinson-Foster, a north London “quartermaster”

who stored guns for gangsters.

Recently a jury convicted Hutchinson-Foster of supplying Mr Duggan with the gun found at the scene of the killing in Ferry Lane.

Pity the many innocent people caught up in the hopeless squalor and violence of places such as Broadwater Farm.