"These riots were not about poverty," said David Cameron. "That insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this."

But the question is: how do we know? If poverty affects health, education and crime, could it be a factor in the events of last week?

We have been collecting courts data for people accused of riots going through the magistrates courts - as of today, the legal system has processed over 2,000 cases and we have been recorded addresses and demographic details. Cameron announced plans to monitor the most troubled families in Britain, but will they work?

Home Office research found that those appearing at court tended to be from more deprived circumstances than the wider population of England: 35% of adults were claiming out-of-work benefits (compared to 12% of the working age population); 42% of young people brought before the courts had free school meals, only available in England to the 16% of secondary school pupils from the poorest backgrounds.

Yesterday, we showed where people accused of rioting lived and compared it to where the riots took place. This showed how Manchester's arrested all came from the suburbs, for instance while in London the riots were closer to home.

We wanted to know what would happen if we overlayed those addresses with the poverty indicators mapped by England's Indices of Multiple Deprivation, which cover very small areas. We had already done this with the riot locations themselves, but knowing where people came from seems a better indicator, especially if people were travelling.

Riots poverty key Photograph: Guardian

The map above is centred on Manchester, where there seems a particularly strong correlation between suspects living in poor areas. Liverpool University urban planning lecturer Alex Singleton took a look at our early data to work out exactly what links can be shown so far by mapping people to IMD areas. He found

• 58% of those appearing in court identified their residential location as being within the 20% most deprived areas in England – which matches what the Home Office found

• for 60% of those addresses appearing in the sample, these areas had not changed; however 14% had got worse

Of course, riots are complex things and all sorts of things play a part, shown by the cases where reasonably well-off people took part. But what if poverty matters, whatever the prime minister says?

As Singleton wrote:

Rioting is deplorable, however, if events such as this are to be mitigated in the future, the prevailing conditions and constraints effecting people living in areas must form part of the discussion. A "broken society" happens somewhere, and geography matters

• DATA: download the latest data from the MoJ and Home Office about the riots

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