At the same time, the police said they had begun a murder inquiry after a 26-year-old man, who was not identified by name, was shot and killed in a car in Croydon, south of London, late Monday as rioters torched and looted buildings — the first known fatality since the unrest began in another part of the city on Saturday.
Mr. Cameron spoke after cutting short a vacation in Tuscany to return home as violence convulsed at least eight new districts in the metropolitan area late Monday and early Tuesday and broke out for the first time in other locations including Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham.
Coming after a cascade of crises, the measures announced by Mr. Cameron seemed to represent a bid to restore some appearance of official authority after nights of chaos and near anarchy, with rioters taunting or outmaneuvering the police, raiding stores and burning buildings.
Seeking to reinforce the message — and to counter public rage at what many perceive as an indecisive official response to the violence — Mr. Cameron toured Croydon, one of the worst-hit areas, and was shown on television accompanied by police officers outside burned-out buildings.
The BBC and other British news organizations reported Tuesday that the police may be permitted to use rubber bullets for the first time as part of the government’s strengthened response to any resumption of the mayhem. David Lammy, Britain’s intellectual property minister, also called for a suspension of Blackberry’s encrypted instant message service. Many rioters, exploiting that service, had been able to organize mobs and outrun the police, who were ill-equipped to monitor it. “It is unfortunate, but for the very short term, London can’t have a night like the last,” Mr. Lammy said in a Twitter post.
Officials at Research in Motion, the corporate parent of Blackberry, declined to comment on whether the service would be suspended. But the company, based in Waterloo, Ontario, issued a statement saying: “We feel for those impacted by recent days’ riots in London. We have engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can.”
Londoners have been stunned not only by the extent of the violence and the speed with which it spread, but also by the spectacle of hooded and masked youths rampaging with seeming impunity despite hundreds of arrests that have filled police cells to overflowing. Many have asked how areas of the city could have been transformed so rapidly from bustling shopping areas one day to quasi war zones the next.
In a cautious response, some citizens took to cleaning up the debris on Tuesday, cheering police patrol vehicles passing by to demonstrate their rejection of the looters. But others remained angry. When London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, visited stricken Clapham in south London on Tuesday after interrupting a vacation, people harangued him on the street, apparently unimpressed by his assurances that rioters would “face punishment they will bitterly regret.”
“You talk about robust policing. What does that actually mean?” one woman in the crowd demanded to know before Mr. Johnson retreated, surrounded by a huddle of reporters and police officers.
Standing outside his office and residence at 10 Downing Street, Mr. Cameron said lawmakers would be called back from their summer recess for one day on Thursday to enable Parliament to assess the situation. All police leave had been canceled, he said, and the number of officers on the streets would be increased to 16,000 on Wednesday night from 6,000 on Tuesday.
“People should be in no doubt that we will do everything necessary to restore order to Britain’s streets and to make them safe for the law-abiding,” he said.
“This is criminality pure and simple, and it has to be confronted and defeated,” Mr. Cameron said. He added that the violence had produced “sickening scenes,” and that the country needed “even more robust police action” to confront the unrest. There would be “many more arrests in the days to come,” he said.
Mr. Cameron’s comments came after violence also erupted overnight in several other cities, including Liverpool, Nottingham and Bristol, as well as in three towns in the county of Kent, southeast of the capital. An enormous fire consumed a large warehouse of Sony electrical goods in the Enfield section of London after an equally ferocious blaze ripped through a furniture store in Croydon whose owners said it survived bombing in World War II unscathed.
Julia Werdigier contributed reporting from London and Rick Gladstone from New York.
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In one episode, three people were arrested on suspicion of attempted murder for trying to run down a police officer with a car as he tried to stop looting in Brent, north London, the police said.
“Last night was the worst the Metropolitan Police Service has seen in current memory for unacceptable levels of widespread looting, fires and disorder,” Scotland Yard said in a statement tallying a further 200 arrests overnight, bringing the total from three nights of unrest to more than 450.
So many people had been detained, the police said, that all the police cells in London were full, and prisoners were being taken to precincts outside the capital.
Londoners awoke in some areas to the sight of fire hoses playing on rows of gutted buildings. Some civic activists in stricken areas used social-networking Web sites to urge people to join clean-up efforts in streets where small businesses had been looted. A video posted on YouTube showed a rioter rifling through the backpack of a dazed and wounded pedestrian, then tossing aside his booty on the sidewalk.
For Mr. Cameron’s government — indeed for Britain — the rapidly worsening situation presented a profound challenge on several fronts.
For a society already under severe economic strain, the rioting raised new questions about the political sustainability of the Cameron government’s spending cuts, particularly the deep cutbacks in social programs. These have hit the country’s poor especially hard, including large numbers of the minority youths who have been at the forefront of the unrest.
In some areas, rioters moving quickly and nimbly on foot and by bicycle seemed so emboldened that they began looting in broad daylight, while others raided small shops and large stores free of any restraint by the police. Newspapers on Tuesday showed images of hooded and masked looters swarming over shelves of cigarettes or making off with flat-screen televisions.
“Descent into hell,” said a front page headline in The Sun tabloid which, like other newspapers, published a dramatic photograph of a woman leaping to safety in the arms of police from a blazing building.
“Mob Rule,” said the page one headline in The Independent, showing a masked rioter in a hooded track suit against a wall of flame.
On Tuesday, the violence seemed to be having a ripple effect beyond its immediate focal points: news reports spoke of a dramatic upsurge in household burglaries; sports authorities said at least two major soccer matches in London — including an international fixture between England and the Netherlands — had been postponed because the police could not spare officers to guarantee crowd safety. The postponements offered a dramatic reminder of the pressures on Mr. Cameron and his colleagues to guarantee a peaceful environment for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.
That $15 billion extravaganza will have its centerpiece in a sprawling vista of new stadiums and an athletes’ village that lie only miles from the neighborhoods where much of the violence in the last three days has taken place.
As in other areas of the city, a group of about 40 residents with brooms and trash bags, responding to an appeal on Twitter, met at Chalk Farm subway station in the north London borough of Camden on Tuesday to help clean up debris.
The group started to make its way down a main shopping road but had to stay clear of the damaged windows of a supermarket and a bicycle shop because they were still cordoned off by police. When some people stopped to clean broken glass on the road in front of some shops, other residents clapped and cheered the group from their windows.
Walking down Camden High Street with a black garbage bag over his shoulder, Tom Moriarty, a musician who lives in Camden, said the unrest had been caused by something “fundamental about how people feel. It’s down to life being a bit harder and people feel they’re not being heard.”
Beyond such social challenges is the crisis enveloping London’s Metropolitan Police. Even before the outbreak of violence, the police have been deeply demoralized by the government’s plan to cut about 9,000 of about 35,000 officers and by accusations that it badly mishandled protests against the government’s austerity program last winter and failed to properly investigate the phone-hacking scandal that has dominated the headlines here for much of the summer. The force now faces widespread accusations that it failed to act quickly and forcefully enough to quell the rioting at its outset over the weekend.
Nothing remotely like the latest unrest had been seen in London since 1985, when another eruption that occurred mainly among black youths led to violent running battles with the police. Known as the Broadwater Farm riots for the housing project where it began, the turmoil took place in the Tottenham district, where the current violence started on Saturday. That grew from a protest outside a police station about the shooting last week by the police of Mark Duggan, 29, who lived in the housing project.
Julia Werdigier contributed reporting from London and Rick Gladstone from New York.
