incredible reporting on the Police side of things
http://www.theguardian.com/football...-deadly-mistakes-and-lies-that-lasted-decades
[h2]Hillsborough disaster: deadly mistakes and lies that lasted decades[/h2]
As the longest inquest in British legal history unfolded, a picture emerged of a callously negligent police force led by an inexperienced commander whose actions directly led to the deaths of 96 people
by David Conn
Tuesday 26 April 2016 07.18 EDT 4821 Shares
It was a year into these inquests, and 26 years since David Duckenfield, as a South Yorkshire police chief superintendent, took command of the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, that he finally, devastatingly, admitted his serious failures directly caused the deaths of 96 people there.
Duckenfield had arrived at the converted courtroom in Warrington with traces of his former authority, but over seven airless, agonisingly tense days in the witness box last March, he was steadily worn down, surrendering slowly into a crumpled heap. From his concession that he had inadequate experience to oversee the safety of 54,000 people, to finally accepting responsibility for the deaths, Duckenfield’s admissions were shockingly complete.
He also admitted at the inquests that even as the event was descending into horror and death, he had infamously lied, telling Graham Kelly, then secretary of the Football Association, that Liverpool fans were to blame, for gaining unauthorised entry through a large exit gate. Duckenfield had in fact himself ordered the gate to be opened, to relieve a crush in the bottleneck approach to the Leppings Lane turnstiles.
The chief constable, Peter Wright, had to state that evening that police had authorised the opening of the gate, but as these inquests, at two years the longest jury case in British history, heard in voluminous detail, Duckenfield’s lie endured. It set the template for the South Yorkshire police stance: to deny any mistakes, and instead to virulently project blame on to the people who had paid to attend a football match and been plunged into hell.
The evidence built into a startling indictment of South Yorkshire police, their chain of command and conduct – a relentlessly detailed evisceration of a British police force. Responsible for an English county at the jeans-and-trainers end of the 1980s, the force had brutally policed the miners’ strike, and was described by some of its own former officers as “regimented”, with morning parade and saluting of officers, ruled by “an iron fist” institutionally unable to admit mistakes.
The dominance of Wright, a decorated career police officer who died in 2011, loomed over the catastrophe. He was depicted as a frighteningly authoritarian figure who treated the force “like his own personal territory” and whose orders nobody – tragically – dared debate.
The families of those killed in the “pens” of Hillsborough’s Leppings Lane terrace, who have had to fight 27 years for justice and accountability, recalled the appalling way the South Yorkshire police treated them, even when breaking the news of loved ones’ deaths. Relatives and survivors recalled indifference, even hostility, in the unfolding horror – although the families’ lawyers thanked individual officers who did their valiant best to help victims. Then there was the unspeakably heartless identification process in the football club gymnasium, after which CID officers immediately grilled families about how much they and their dead loved ones had had to drink.
The families, and many survivors, spoke up in the witness box at these inquests to reclaim the good names of the people, mostly young, who went to Hillsborough that sunny April day, to watch Kenny Dalglish’s brilliant Liverpool team.
The overwhelming evidence, shown in BBC colour footage of the horrific scene, contrary to the lurid, defamatory tales spun afterwards by the police, was of Liverpool supporters heroically helping. The “fans” – a label too often applied to depict a dehumanised mob – included doctors, nurses and police officers, alongside scores of people with no medical training who, once they had escaped themselves, fought instinctively to save lives.
The 96 people who died or were fatally injured in “pens” three and four, standing right behind the goal, so by definition Liverpool’s hard core of support, were honoured by their families in achingly tender personal statements read out in court. They came from all walks of life: working-class, middle-class, wealthy, hard-up, from Liverpool, the Midlands, London and around the country. They included a heartbreakingly large number of young people – 37 were teenagers – because to watch an FA Cup semi-final then cost only £6. They were sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, one wife – Christine Jones, 27 – and partners. Twenty-five were fathers; one, 38-year-old Inger Shah, was a single mother with two teenagers: altogether, 58 children lost a parent .
The horror the victims suffered and the generally abject response of the police and South Yorkshire metropolitan ambulance service (SYMAS) were exposed in greater detail than ever before, in months of film and photographic evidence, from cameras that had been at Hillsborough to cover a football match. Survivors of the lethal crush bore tearful witness to the vice-like squeeze, the cracking of ribs, arms and legs, faces losing colour, the vomiting and emptying of bowels and bladders, relatives and friends dying next to them, the still barely believable piles of dead bodies at the front of the “pens”.
One doctor said the crush, which caused death by compression asphyxia as people could not expand their chests to breathe in, was “like a constrictor snake”. Survivors recalled their own helpless entrapment, the agonising suffocation, the eye-popping panic, the terrible screams for help, the delayed reaction of South Yorkshire police officers on the other side of the metal perimeter fence.
The makeshift courtroom, assembled within the ground floor of a plate glass office block on a Warrington business park, often felt blankly incongruous for stories of such human extremes.
Yet the remnants of the police effort to blame the supporters were on show even here, despite the families’ long, exhausting battle against it, and the lord chief justice, Igor Judge, having stated when he quashed the first inquest that the narrative was false.
Duckenfield’s own barrister, John Beggs QC, an advocate instructed by police forces nationwide, pressed the case most forcefully that supporters had misbehaved, persistently introducing as context into his questioning notorious previous episodes of football hooliganism, his manner often repellent to the families attending.
But Beggs was not alone. The present-day South Yorkshire police force itself and the Police Federation also argued that Liverpool supporters outside the Leppings Lane end could be found to have contributed to the disaster because “a significant minority” were alleged to have been drunk and “non-compliant” with police orders to move back. Yet survivors gave evidence of chaos at the Leppings Lane approach, no atmosphere of drunkenness or misbehaviour, and no meaningful police activity to make orderly queueing possible in that nasty space.
Many officers who made such allegations against supporters in their original 1989 accounts, which the force notoriously vetted and altered, maintained that stance under scathing challenge by the families’ barristers. For periods, these inquests felt like an inversion of a criminal prosecution, in which police officers were repeatedly accused of lying, covering up and perverting the course of justice, while sticking insistently to their stories.
Even as the terrible failures of Hillsborough were being laid bare at the inquests, the South Yorkshire police culture of the 1980s, and its other infamous scandal, Orgreave, were being further exposed. In July, the Independent Police Complaints Commission decided not to formally investigate the force for its alleged assaults on striking miners picketing the Orgreave coking plant in June 1984, and alleged perjury and perverting the course of justice in prosecutions of 95 miners which collapsed a year later.
However, the IPCC’s review found “support for the allegation” that three senior South Yorkshire officers had “made up an untrue account exaggerating the degree of violence” from miners, to justify the police’s own actions that day. It revealed that senior officers and the force’s own solicitor privately recognised there had been some excessive police violence, and perjury in the 1985 trial, but never acknowledged it publicly, and settled 39 miners’ civil claims, paying £425,000 without admitting liability. The IPCC said the evidence “raises ... doubts about the ethical standards and complicity of officers high up in [South Yorkshire police]”.
Wright never doubted the rightness of the violent defeat meted out to the miners, and when the prosecutions collapsed adamantly denied any malpractice. No police officer was ever disciplined or held accountable, and there was no reform.
Four years later, on 15 April 1989, 24,000 Liverpool supporters set off in high spirits for the semi-final in Sheffield, their safety dependent on the same police force.
Wright’s high-handed rule was at the root of the disaster, the inquests heard. Just 19 days before the semi-final, he abruptly moved his seasoned, expert, popular commander at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium, Ch Supt Brian Mole. In Mole’s place, Wright promoted Duckenfield, who had never commanded a match at Hillsborough before, nor even been on duty there for 10 years.
A trail of former officers bleakly confirmed the farce behind the switch: a bullying prank played on a probationary constable by officers in Mole’s division the previous October. Reportedly to teach him a lesson because they felt he was making radio distress calls too readily, the officers put on balaclavas and terrified the probationer with a mock armed holdup. On 20 February 1989, Wright personally sacked four officers and disciplined four more for this excessive internal prank. But Wright’s disastrous decision to move Mole was never questioned by senior officers.
Peter Hayes, deputy chief constable in 1989, and Stuart Anderson, assistant chief constable in charge of personnel, came as old men to these inquests, and denied Mole was moved because of the prank, saying it was for “career development”. Anderson said Mole needed experience outside Sheffield and the force was having problems policing Barnsley, which could be “extremely hostile” after the miners’ strike, in a climate of “social disintegration” and the impending closure of 14 pits.
Walter Jackson, assistant chief constable for operations, however, told the inquests that he did believe Mole was moved for not having dealt with the indiscipline firmly.
Within F division’s base at Hammerton Road station, the Guardian has been told, rank-and-file officers believed that Mole, their popular “gaffer”, was moved because of the prank. If it had been career development, there was no explanation as to why it had to be so sudden or so close to the semi-final, the force’s biggest operation of the year, nor why Mole was said by several witnesses, including Duckenfield, to have been disappointed. Nor was it clear why the force organised no professional handover: Mole cleared his desk and left. A dispute still rattles down the years about whether he offered to help Duckenfield with the match, which, in his evidence, Duckenfield denied.
Jackson and Anderson still stood by their belief that Duckenfield could handle the semi-final, given experienced officers and the operational plan in place from the previous year when, under Mole’s command, an identical match between the same two clubs was played at Hillsborough.
It was revelatory to hear F division officers recount Duckenfield’s heavy-handed manner on his arrival, how unpopular he made himself. William West, a constable, remembered Duckenfield telling officers “we were useless, we were no good, we had been doing it all wrong … He got us into the briefing room and he basically spoke at us for 20 minutes, telling us how the district was a disgrace, it had been badly run, it was going to be his way now.” Duckenfield, said West, “wasn’t a pleasant man”. He imagined he would be a bully, and “look for scapegoats”.
Duckenfield told the inquests that he did inherit disciplinary problems from Mole, that he believed this was a reason why Mole was moved, and that he himself was from the force’s “disciplinarian” wing. After taking over on 27 March 1989, Duckenfield found time to lay down the law to his officers, but he admitted to Christina Lambert QC, for the coroner, Sir John Goldring, that he failed to do basic preparation for the semi-final. He did not study relevant paperwork, including the force’s major incident procedure, and signed off the operational plan two days after taking over, before he had even visited the ground.
He turned up to command the semi-final, he admitted, knowing very little about Hillsborough’s safety history: about the crushes at the 1981 and 1988 semi-finals, or that the approach to the Leppings Lane end was a “natural geographical bottleneck” to which Mole had carefully managed supporters’ entry.
Duckenfield admitted he had not familiarised himself in any detail with the ground’s layout or capacities of its different sections. He did not know the seven turnstiles, through which 10,100 Liverpool supporters with standing tickets had to be funnelled to gain access to the Leppings Lane terrace, opened opposite a large tunnel leading straight to the central pens, three and four. He did not even know that the police were responsible for monitoring overcrowding, nor that the police had a tactic, named after a superintendent, John Freeman, of closing the tunnel when the central pens were full, and directing supporters to the sides. He admitted his focus before the match had been on dealing with misbehaviour, and he had not considered the need to protect people from overcrowding or crushing.
The families of the people who were ushered into that terrifyingly unsafe situation and died read shattering personal statements, many remembering their loved ones’ casual goodbyes. Irene McGlone recalled her husband, Alan, 24, skipping with their daughters, Amy, then five, and two-year-old Claire, before driving to Hillsborough with three friends including Joseph Clark, 29, another father of two, who also died. That night, Amy asked if her dad could wake them up when he came home.
“I am still waiting to wake my girls up from this nightmare, and send their daddy in to them,” McGlone wrote.
http://www.theguardian.com/football...-deadly-mistakes-and-lies-that-lasted-decades
[h2]Hillsborough disaster: deadly mistakes and lies that lasted decades[/h2]
As the longest inquest in British legal history unfolded, a picture emerged of a callously negligent police force led by an inexperienced commander whose actions directly led to the deaths of 96 people
by David Conn
Tuesday 26 April 2016 07.18 EDT 4821 Shares
It was a year into these inquests, and 26 years since David Duckenfield, as a South Yorkshire police chief superintendent, took command of the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, that he finally, devastatingly, admitted his serious failures directly caused the deaths of 96 people there.
Duckenfield had arrived at the converted courtroom in Warrington with traces of his former authority, but over seven airless, agonisingly tense days in the witness box last March, he was steadily worn down, surrendering slowly into a crumpled heap. From his concession that he had inadequate experience to oversee the safety of 54,000 people, to finally accepting responsibility for the deaths, Duckenfield’s admissions were shockingly complete.
He also admitted at the inquests that even as the event was descending into horror and death, he had infamously lied, telling Graham Kelly, then secretary of the Football Association, that Liverpool fans were to blame, for gaining unauthorised entry through a large exit gate. Duckenfield had in fact himself ordered the gate to be opened, to relieve a crush in the bottleneck approach to the Leppings Lane turnstiles.
The chief constable, Peter Wright, had to state that evening that police had authorised the opening of the gate, but as these inquests, at two years the longest jury case in British history, heard in voluminous detail, Duckenfield’s lie endured. It set the template for the South Yorkshire police stance: to deny any mistakes, and instead to virulently project blame on to the people who had paid to attend a football match and been plunged into hell.
The evidence built into a startling indictment of South Yorkshire police, their chain of command and conduct – a relentlessly detailed evisceration of a British police force. Responsible for an English county at the jeans-and-trainers end of the 1980s, the force had brutally policed the miners’ strike, and was described by some of its own former officers as “regimented”, with morning parade and saluting of officers, ruled by “an iron fist” institutionally unable to admit mistakes.
The dominance of Wright, a decorated career police officer who died in 2011, loomed over the catastrophe. He was depicted as a frighteningly authoritarian figure who treated the force “like his own personal territory” and whose orders nobody – tragically – dared debate.
The families of those killed in the “pens” of Hillsborough’s Leppings Lane terrace, who have had to fight 27 years for justice and accountability, recalled the appalling way the South Yorkshire police treated them, even when breaking the news of loved ones’ deaths. Relatives and survivors recalled indifference, even hostility, in the unfolding horror – although the families’ lawyers thanked individual officers who did their valiant best to help victims. Then there was the unspeakably heartless identification process in the football club gymnasium, after which CID officers immediately grilled families about how much they and their dead loved ones had had to drink.
The families, and many survivors, spoke up in the witness box at these inquests to reclaim the good names of the people, mostly young, who went to Hillsborough that sunny April day, to watch Kenny Dalglish’s brilliant Liverpool team.
The overwhelming evidence, shown in BBC colour footage of the horrific scene, contrary to the lurid, defamatory tales spun afterwards by the police, was of Liverpool supporters heroically helping. The “fans” – a label too often applied to depict a dehumanised mob – included doctors, nurses and police officers, alongside scores of people with no medical training who, once they had escaped themselves, fought instinctively to save lives.
The 96 people who died or were fatally injured in “pens” three and four, standing right behind the goal, so by definition Liverpool’s hard core of support, were honoured by their families in achingly tender personal statements read out in court. They came from all walks of life: working-class, middle-class, wealthy, hard-up, from Liverpool, the Midlands, London and around the country. They included a heartbreakingly large number of young people – 37 were teenagers – because to watch an FA Cup semi-final then cost only £6. They were sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, one wife – Christine Jones, 27 – and partners. Twenty-five were fathers; one, 38-year-old Inger Shah, was a single mother with two teenagers: altogether, 58 children lost a parent .
The horror the victims suffered and the generally abject response of the police and South Yorkshire metropolitan ambulance service (SYMAS) were exposed in greater detail than ever before, in months of film and photographic evidence, from cameras that had been at Hillsborough to cover a football match. Survivors of the lethal crush bore tearful witness to the vice-like squeeze, the cracking of ribs, arms and legs, faces losing colour, the vomiting and emptying of bowels and bladders, relatives and friends dying next to them, the still barely believable piles of dead bodies at the front of the “pens”.
One doctor said the crush, which caused death by compression asphyxia as people could not expand their chests to breathe in, was “like a constrictor snake”. Survivors recalled their own helpless entrapment, the agonising suffocation, the eye-popping panic, the terrible screams for help, the delayed reaction of South Yorkshire police officers on the other side of the metal perimeter fence.
The makeshift courtroom, assembled within the ground floor of a plate glass office block on a Warrington business park, often felt blankly incongruous for stories of such human extremes.
Yet the remnants of the police effort to blame the supporters were on show even here, despite the families’ long, exhausting battle against it, and the lord chief justice, Igor Judge, having stated when he quashed the first inquest that the narrative was false.
Duckenfield’s own barrister, John Beggs QC, an advocate instructed by police forces nationwide, pressed the case most forcefully that supporters had misbehaved, persistently introducing as context into his questioning notorious previous episodes of football hooliganism, his manner often repellent to the families attending.
But Beggs was not alone. The present-day South Yorkshire police force itself and the Police Federation also argued that Liverpool supporters outside the Leppings Lane end could be found to have contributed to the disaster because “a significant minority” were alleged to have been drunk and “non-compliant” with police orders to move back. Yet survivors gave evidence of chaos at the Leppings Lane approach, no atmosphere of drunkenness or misbehaviour, and no meaningful police activity to make orderly queueing possible in that nasty space.
Many officers who made such allegations against supporters in their original 1989 accounts, which the force notoriously vetted and altered, maintained that stance under scathing challenge by the families’ barristers. For periods, these inquests felt like an inversion of a criminal prosecution, in which police officers were repeatedly accused of lying, covering up and perverting the course of justice, while sticking insistently to their stories.
Even as the terrible failures of Hillsborough were being laid bare at the inquests, the South Yorkshire police culture of the 1980s, and its other infamous scandal, Orgreave, were being further exposed. In July, the Independent Police Complaints Commission decided not to formally investigate the force for its alleged assaults on striking miners picketing the Orgreave coking plant in June 1984, and alleged perjury and perverting the course of justice in prosecutions of 95 miners which collapsed a year later.
However, the IPCC’s review found “support for the allegation” that three senior South Yorkshire officers had “made up an untrue account exaggerating the degree of violence” from miners, to justify the police’s own actions that day. It revealed that senior officers and the force’s own solicitor privately recognised there had been some excessive police violence, and perjury in the 1985 trial, but never acknowledged it publicly, and settled 39 miners’ civil claims, paying £425,000 without admitting liability. The IPCC said the evidence “raises ... doubts about the ethical standards and complicity of officers high up in [South Yorkshire police]”.
Wright never doubted the rightness of the violent defeat meted out to the miners, and when the prosecutions collapsed adamantly denied any malpractice. No police officer was ever disciplined or held accountable, and there was no reform.
Four years later, on 15 April 1989, 24,000 Liverpool supporters set off in high spirits for the semi-final in Sheffield, their safety dependent on the same police force.
Wright’s high-handed rule was at the root of the disaster, the inquests heard. Just 19 days before the semi-final, he abruptly moved his seasoned, expert, popular commander at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium, Ch Supt Brian Mole. In Mole’s place, Wright promoted Duckenfield, who had never commanded a match at Hillsborough before, nor even been on duty there for 10 years.
A trail of former officers bleakly confirmed the farce behind the switch: a bullying prank played on a probationary constable by officers in Mole’s division the previous October. Reportedly to teach him a lesson because they felt he was making radio distress calls too readily, the officers put on balaclavas and terrified the probationer with a mock armed holdup. On 20 February 1989, Wright personally sacked four officers and disciplined four more for this excessive internal prank. But Wright’s disastrous decision to move Mole was never questioned by senior officers.
Peter Hayes, deputy chief constable in 1989, and Stuart Anderson, assistant chief constable in charge of personnel, came as old men to these inquests, and denied Mole was moved because of the prank, saying it was for “career development”. Anderson said Mole needed experience outside Sheffield and the force was having problems policing Barnsley, which could be “extremely hostile” after the miners’ strike, in a climate of “social disintegration” and the impending closure of 14 pits.
Walter Jackson, assistant chief constable for operations, however, told the inquests that he did believe Mole was moved for not having dealt with the indiscipline firmly.
Within F division’s base at Hammerton Road station, the Guardian has been told, rank-and-file officers believed that Mole, their popular “gaffer”, was moved because of the prank. If it had been career development, there was no explanation as to why it had to be so sudden or so close to the semi-final, the force’s biggest operation of the year, nor why Mole was said by several witnesses, including Duckenfield, to have been disappointed. Nor was it clear why the force organised no professional handover: Mole cleared his desk and left. A dispute still rattles down the years about whether he offered to help Duckenfield with the match, which, in his evidence, Duckenfield denied.
Jackson and Anderson still stood by their belief that Duckenfield could handle the semi-final, given experienced officers and the operational plan in place from the previous year when, under Mole’s command, an identical match between the same two clubs was played at Hillsborough.
It was revelatory to hear F division officers recount Duckenfield’s heavy-handed manner on his arrival, how unpopular he made himself. William West, a constable, remembered Duckenfield telling officers “we were useless, we were no good, we had been doing it all wrong … He got us into the briefing room and he basically spoke at us for 20 minutes, telling us how the district was a disgrace, it had been badly run, it was going to be his way now.” Duckenfield, said West, “wasn’t a pleasant man”. He imagined he would be a bully, and “look for scapegoats”.
Duckenfield told the inquests that he did inherit disciplinary problems from Mole, that he believed this was a reason why Mole was moved, and that he himself was from the force’s “disciplinarian” wing. After taking over on 27 March 1989, Duckenfield found time to lay down the law to his officers, but he admitted to Christina Lambert QC, for the coroner, Sir John Goldring, that he failed to do basic preparation for the semi-final. He did not study relevant paperwork, including the force’s major incident procedure, and signed off the operational plan two days after taking over, before he had even visited the ground.
He turned up to command the semi-final, he admitted, knowing very little about Hillsborough’s safety history: about the crushes at the 1981 and 1988 semi-finals, or that the approach to the Leppings Lane end was a “natural geographical bottleneck” to which Mole had carefully managed supporters’ entry.
Duckenfield admitted he had not familiarised himself in any detail with the ground’s layout or capacities of its different sections. He did not know the seven turnstiles, through which 10,100 Liverpool supporters with standing tickets had to be funnelled to gain access to the Leppings Lane terrace, opened opposite a large tunnel leading straight to the central pens, three and four. He did not even know that the police were responsible for monitoring overcrowding, nor that the police had a tactic, named after a superintendent, John Freeman, of closing the tunnel when the central pens were full, and directing supporters to the sides. He admitted his focus before the match had been on dealing with misbehaviour, and he had not considered the need to protect people from overcrowding or crushing.
The families of the people who were ushered into that terrifyingly unsafe situation and died read shattering personal statements, many remembering their loved ones’ casual goodbyes. Irene McGlone recalled her husband, Alan, 24, skipping with their daughters, Amy, then five, and two-year-old Claire, before driving to Hillsborough with three friends including Joseph Clark, 29, another father of two, who also died. That night, Amy asked if her dad could wake them up when he came home.
“I am still waiting to wake my girls up from this nightmare, and send their daddy in to them,” McGlone wrote.
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