>> FOOTBALL, IN ENGLAND, IS THE
PEOPLE'S GAME AND WORKING MAN'S
GAME.
BUT EVERYONE PLAYED THE GAME,
CERTAINLY EVERYONE I KNEW PLAYED
THE GAME FROM AN EARLY AGE, AS
SOON AS YOU COULD KICK A BALL.
AND THEN, AS YOU GREW OLDER, YOU
WENT TO THE GAMES.
WHICHEVER TEAM YOU SUPPORTED,
YOU WENT, AND ON THE MONDAY
MORNING, YOU'D ALL BE AT SCHOOL
DISCUSSING THE GAMES FROM THE
WEEKEND.
I'M A SHEFF WEDNESDAY FAN, AND I
WAS BORN IN SHEFFIELD ON A
WEDNESDAY.
YOU COULDN'T HAVE SCRIPTED IT
BETTER.
AND I'VE BEEN A SEASON-TICKET
HOLDER FOR 35 YEARS.
FOOTBALL WAS INGRAINED IN THE
FABRIC OF THE SOCIETY, CERTAINLY
THE AREA THAT I GREW UP IN.
AT THAT TIME, THE BIGGEST GAME
OF THE YEAR WAS THE FA CUP
FINAL.
IT WAS THE SHOWPIECE EVENT.
AND THE NEXT BIGGEST GAME WAS
THE SEMI-FINAL.
AND SO FOR ANYONE ON THAT DAY TO
GET A TICKET FOR THE FINAL --
THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN HEADING TO
HILLSBOROUGH JUST THINKING
THEY'D WON THE LOTTERY.
You get up in the morning. You come out after winter and
you come out and it's lovely
and sunny and just a
little bit warm.
You go, Ah.
It was a lovely day.
It meant that life was Liverpool, and so it became
to me as well.
It was never any choice of
being anybody else.
You were always going to
be a Liverpool fan.
The F.A. Cup Semifinal still at that point meant something.
And winning an F.A. Cup
Semifinal, being at an F.A. Cup
Semifinal was a very special
event in any football fan's life
at that point.
Not really doing anything on my own.
I don't think I was a very
grown up 18 year old.
We took her to the train and put her on the train and Richard was
to meet her at the other end.
We were going up after
the game and we were picking
Stephanie up and driving her
home and we were gonna have a
picnic on the pass on the way
out to Sheffield.
Trace was gonna bring all
butties, I was gonna bring the
goodies, as she said, cakes,
biscuits, bottle of wine.
James was so excited that
he was going to the game.
When he got on the front door,
he just turned round and looked
at me and he said, Mom, we're
gonna win today, and I just shut
the door never knowing that'd
be the last time I'd ever see
my son alive.
Saturday the 15th of April, 1989, went on duty about half
past 8 in the morning.
Obviously we knew it was a
semi-final match,
Liverpool and Notts Forest.
Epic game.
Obviously you've got to have
police officers not just at the
ground, you've got to cover the
whole city so it's all hands to
the pump, really.
I'd booked to go to Scotland for a week and they said you're
gonna have to delay it because
we need everybody to work on a
Saturday, and of course you can
go on your leave on a Sunday.
We got to the grounds about
9:30 AM, drove there in our
own cars in uniform.
I think I parked probably half a
mile away from Hillsborough and
walked down to the ground.
The police would come from all over South Yorkshire.
There'd be dog handlers,
police horses.
In the calendar of
South Yorkshire's year this
will have been the biggest
thing they were doing.
A third of the force all out on
one day, massive operation.
It needed somebody with
experience and know how,
and craft, and also somebody
who knew about football.
Sheffield Wednesday football club is under the jurisdiction
of Hamilton Road police station.
The chief superintendent who has
responsibility for that division
is Brian Mole.
Brian Mole has policed Hillsborough and been
responsible for Hillsborough
Stadium since the early 80s.
He's one of those guys who grew into this job and was loyal
to his officers but he was
grounded in experience.
He knew the job.
He knew the area and actually
knew football as well.
[ Unintelligible yelling ]
Shut your mouth or I'll blow your head off!
Shut it!
An informant had told me that a young police officer who was in
his early 20s, very new to the
service, had been lured to a
post office in Ranmoor.
[ yelling]
From there he was taken by armed robbers
with balaclavas on.
[ yelling ]
They had two pistols with them. They pointed them at his head.
It later turned out they were just officers playing
a trick on him.
Now, none of us are going to enjoy that, and they certainly
aren't going to enjoy it
when you find out there's
some colleagues that's done
it to you.
His humiliation must have been complete.
He went home, told his wife, and then the next thing you
know a complaint's made.
So, an investigation was
started, which was when the leak
came to me that they set this
poor officer up.
At the end of it all they decided to sack four of them
and reduce two in rank
and fine two others.
There's a huge amount of embarrassment and chief
superintendent Brian Mole,
who would have had absolutely
nothing whatsoever to do with
the incident, felt the sharp
brunt of it by being
transferred, I think I'm right
in saying, for the first
time ever outside of
Sheffield from F division
Hamilton Road to Barnsley.
It means that 21 days before the semifinal, on the 15th of April
1989, 21 days, an officer with
no experience of policing
Hillsborough is given the job
that Brian Mole had.
David Duckenfield is in a
position where he does not have
the experience to deal
with the complexity of
Hillsborough should anything
actually go wrong.
The first thing he said when he sat down was, Welcome ladies
and gentlemen to the
press conference ahead
of the Liverpool
versus Nottinghamshire.
And everybody looked around and then somebody said,
not, Nottingham Forest,
Nottingham Forest.
So, I immediately thought, if he
doesn't know the names of the
teams at this stage, yeah,
that's a bit odd.
Maybe it was a slip
of the tongue.
But it also made me think, maybe
he isn't a football person.
>This is an all-ticket game.
A football person's likely to
have a better handle on what the
event's going to be like and all
the different combinations that
make up football in terms of the
passions and the tribalism.
He just came across as an
academic, not somebody that was
in any way, shape, or form
like his predecessor.
About ten o'clockish we went into the north stand,
the cantilever stand and
we had a briefing with a lot
of senior officers.
The briefing basically went
the same at every match.
You had discussions of how to react with people
who were arrested for
offenses, monitoring the
crowd for offenses,
disciplining the crowd.
And not a word on crowd safety. This briefing just seemed to
go on, and on, and on.
And I'll always remember
Mr. Duckenfield, his last words
were, Well ladies and gentlemen,
I know it's been a very long
and involved briefing, but I do
believe we've covered
for every eventuality.
And I thought at the time, I thought, this guy likes
the sound of his own voice.
Hillsborough was an old stadium that had been kind of upgraded
for the 1966 World Cup.
There had been modifications
made but a perfect example
of its danger was the
Leppings Lane End.
If you start out on the street,
there is only access
from Leppings Lane.
You arrive outside of the
stadium and it was a
well-known bottle neck.
You've got over 24,000 people
being processed through this
small number of turnstiles.
All of the fans are converging
on the one spot.
We didn't really have plans for going to the match.
We couldn't get tickets.
It was always impossible
almost to get tickets
for the semifinal.
But you didn't want
to miss that.
So, it was worth a drive to
Sheffield on the off chance that
you might get in the ground.
At that end of the ground, the Hillsborough, there
is a concourse area.
You kind of go in to some
outer gates before you go
through the turnstiles.
And we were herded
into that area.
I didn't have tickets but I
thought, I'm herded in here, you
know what, who knows what might
happen, who knows, I might be
able to give a guy a fiver
on the gate.
It got fairly crushy there. And so, they opened
up the gates, and
everyone went through.
And we thought, brilliant.
Like all of us, I tried to get behind the goal and way too many
of us tried to get behind the
goal and it was about the
worst experience I ever had
at a football match.
The match in 1981 when fans were crushed at Hillsborough, people
could have been seriously
injured or killed.
The game proceeded even though
some fans went to the hospital.
Many had bruised ribs.
And the police took the decision
to allow them to sit quietly
around the perimeter track.
And the police indicated that had that not occurred there
could have been deaths.
And the response from the chair
of the club was to say,
that was a nonsense.
I think he used
the phrase bollocks.
Nobody would have died. That to me is a clear indication
of how deep institutional
complacency can run.
Despite all the warning signs of 1981, nothing was in the
operational order to prepare
police officers for what
happened on the day
at Hillsborough with
regards to safety.
Obviously first thing, there's nobody there first off.
I expected it to be slow but
it was extremely slow.
It was so slow that one of the
turnstile operators remarked to
another he'd only had 74 people
through and he was so bored
he'd worked out what rate they
got to come through at.
We got to the ground probably at about 1:30.
Liverpool fans were arriving.
There weren't that many there,
and we just started hunting around to see if we could find
anybody who might want
to swap a ticket.
So, we sort of, we managed that
pretty quickly, I think.
A guy was pretty pleased to get
two significantly more expensive
tickets in the stand and he
swapped those for a
pair of tickets for the
Leppings Lane Terrace.
We went through that turnstile at about 2:00 into that
concourse behind the stand and
then just saw the sign that
said, Standing, right in
the middle of the bottom
of that stand.
There was only one place we were
going and that sort of thrill
you get as a football fan when
you go into the ground
and you get the first glimpse
of the pitch.
You're going to see Liverpool play in the F.A. Cup Semifinal.
We were in and we were
right behind the goal.
It were like a good natured carnival atmosphere.
It was a semifinal.
Saw one or two fans who were obviously, they'd have
their drink, but they weren't,
you couldn't construe them
as being drunk for purposes
looking out for drunkenness
early or all like that.
And if they got a tin here out
we made them either sip it up or
pour it down a grate before they
went in to ground.
We walked down towards the grounds and there was just a few
people first of all and then it
just built up and I was
surprised at the amount of
people that were walking
towards the ground.
Didn't really see any visible police presence.
We were checking fans all coming through the turnstile,
searching, they're all decent
people, good humored, sober,
well behaved, well mannered,
very compliant, and it was a
really good, good atmosphere.
And then it started to get
busier, and busier.
The attitudes seemed to change. It was about twenty past two,
twenty five past two.
Myself and a colleague detained
a lad who jumped through the
turnstile without a ticket,
detained him, took him to the
police room, processed him
through there, and when we came
back it was just mayhem.
We got there about twenty past and it was really busy outside.
There was no
real organization there.
It was just a mass of people.
There was no
queuing or anything.
The more we were watching it
the less people seemed to
be going into, there seems to
be anybody really going
through the turnstiles.
We thought the turnstiles
must have been broken.
In a previous year we got
there at the same time.
And we just, I don't remember
any problems at all, we just
seemed to walk straight in.
At that time the Leppings Lane at Hillsborough was segregated
into pens and the two central
pens were behind the goal, were
quite busy, but the ones to the
side were really empty.
You look at the Liverpool end to the right of the goal, there's
hardly anybody on those steps.
To the right of there,
that's it, look down there.
That's like some sort
of segregation for what
they call neutrals,
who got their tickets
from Sheffield Wednesday.
That could be it, I suppose.
You could see all the concrete, you could see
the crash barriers.
If you could see concrete
or you could see barriers,
you knew there was a lot
of spare capacity.
But the two central pens were quite busy.
It just kept on filling up and filling up.
And I said to Phil at one point
should we go down the front,
because it's getting
uncomfortable here?
We mulled it over for like five minutes.
We were standing next
to each other.
And then by about half two it
just got more and more full to
the point where we couldn't
have got down the front
if we wanted to.
We all know that football fans love to get behind the goal.
Soon that fills up and what
you do is you work sideways
from there and you find
your own level.
You'd always have the sway and
the push and the shove, and all
of the things we now know
that are so dangerous,
but that would be the way.
You could go sideways if you
felt that you were being crushed
you could move sideways.
Once pens were introduced at
Hillsborough in 1985 you
couldn't move sideways.
You had to stay in
that confined area.
So, that idea that fans could go down that tunnel,
into the backs of already
crowded fans, and then
somehow they could find their
own level, is a nonsense because
there was nowhere to go.
The control box is right there at the corner of Leppings Lane.
It's above the terrace. Perfect view right down into the
central pens and right across
the hold of the terrace.
It's a very small box full of
monitors monitoring the crowd
at all points.
In the control box you have
Chief Superintendent David
Duckenfield, you have his
assistant Bernard Murray.
The only place where there is
relative silence and relative
calm is in the control box.
Those officers inside the ground and outside the ground are
dependent on the control
box for instructions.
This is the hub.
You can see right beneath them, right in their eye line, they
don't need monitors, you
can see this incredible
compression of bodies.
So, you can already see at that
point prior to the disaster
occurring that the central
pens are packed tight.
Had some lunch in the gymnasium. And then there was like an
atmosphere started and you could
see police would start looking
at the door, you're thinking,
what's going on?
The atmosphere
started to build.
And everyone's like,
let's go, where's my hat,
where's my helmet,
where are my gloves?
You can tell people's tone of voice starts to creep up.
You're thinking, that's not
sounding too good.
I think we're getting ready to
move and of course we were
deployed to Leppings Lane end.
There was a mass of people
in front of the ground.
Couldn't see any turnstiles at all.
The crowd builds up behind us so much so that we
were in a mass of people.
As soon as we came around that
corner you could see just a
press of people outside.
How are we going to get all these people in?
People are being forced through the turnstiles.
We were literally pulling people
through the turnstiles to get
them out of the crush outside.
It was quite normal that a
message would be given that the kickoff is being delayed and
that can then be relayed
to the fans outside.
But there's no plan
to delay the kickoff.
You could hear on Sergeant Jake's radio the voices of
police officers getting more
and more frantic and when
I say frantic, I mean frantic.
You could tell...
...there was an element of fear in the voices.
Some poor lad just lost it. I remember this on the radio
saying, for fuck's sake,
for fuck's sake, open
these gates, if you don't open
these gates people are going to
die, for fuck's sake, please
open these gates.
I looked and said,
someone's swearing
on the radio.
It didn't happen,
you just didn't do it.
You would hope that people
would see what was happening
outside the ground. CCTV would have shown what was
happening outside the ground.
There seemed to be a big
gap, a big black hole, a big
nothingness coming from the
police control room. It was as if everybody
had just frozen.
You're in a situation where the
pressure is so great that you're
going to actually have injury
and death outside the ground.
The police officer in charge outside the ground,
Superintendent Marshall
realizes this.
He phones through into the
ground to Duckenfield.
He can see what's happening
outside the ground on his
monitors and he's asked to open
exit gate C so that the fans who
are at the back of that crush
can be fed in to exit gate C,
therefore relieving the crush at
the turnstiles, preventing death
or injury as Marshall puts it,
outside of the stadium.
Duckenfield takes the decision. If this is what needs
to be done, so be it.
He orders the gate to be opened, and at that point, unstewarded,
in come the fans.
We just went in with the crowd.
We were among the first 20 or 30 to actually go through the
gates that were opened.
Someone got tickets and was
saying, do you want to see
my ticket, and I said, no,
just get in, just get in.
The gate got opened.
So we then just walked, well actually paced through.
I said to me mates, because I was in the stands, so I was
in the wrong area, so I said
to them, I'll see you later.
Yeah, fine.
And I went one way and he
went down the tunnel.
Foolishly we just went
for the tunnel really.
We just went straight
down the tunnel.
An open-mouthed tunnel,
nobody policing it.
Previous years, thought it'd
been sealed when it appeared
that the central pens were
full, but not this year.
I know that when you come through that gate you
see that tunnel...
You certainly wouldn't think about going past the
tunnel and into the other
entrance into the west end.
We were in red, they were all whites.
The pitch was as green
as you've ever seen.
If you were to take a
snapshot of football at
its most beautiful.
That was that moment
I just thought to myself,
this is great.
Football doesn't get
any better than this.
So, on a clear, sunny day at Hillsborough, the stage is
set for a rerun of
last year's classic.
Liverpool in red,
Forest all in white.
Stuart Pearce gives away
the first free kick.
I had no idea that the game had even started.
We were pushed forward very
quickly, just the momentum
took us forward and there was
a gap created behind us
obviously from the momentum
that had come and Tracey
had fallen down.
I turned around and somebody picked her up.
I didn't see sight of Richard
or Tracey after that.
By the time I stopped I was
right near the front.
This panicked mass.
Nobody was watching the game.
There was a bit of a surge and
I got pushed onto a barrier.
It eased off a bit, and I turned around and I could see my dad
behind me and the last thing I
said to him was, are you okay?
And he just said, yeah.
Next thing, I was pushed again.
The pressure just got immensely worse.
At the beginning I thought,
oh it's going to, it'll ease
off again because it
always eases off.
I've done this countless times.
But it just didn't
ease off at all.
It just got tighter and tighter.
The only recollection I have of the six minutes that was played
was Beardsley hit the bar.
Beardsley... Oh, he's hit the bar!
That was the moment it felt like
the crowd sort of convulsed,
and then something went.
I felt very lightheaded. I felt like my
vision was narrowing.
And you were hearing shouting about, hold him up, hold him up,
hold him up.
I've got to get down.
If I can get down
I'll be alright.
If it just eases off for a
second I'll get down
on the floor.
And I thought,
that's what I'll do.
And then I'm thinking to myself,
no, I'm dying here.
Eventually I passed out.
Nothing was being done.
These two or three police officers, whatever it was, were
just looking, telling this guy
to get off the crash barrier.
This was unfolding within feet
of where they were standing.
I presume that these guys had policed football matches
many, many times before.
Which says it all about how the police saw football
fans at that time.
There are fans on the pitch here in the six yard area,
The referee is gonna
have to stop the game.
There's an overflow behind the
goal and the police inspector
is on the pitch.
And they've come through the barriers.
I can only thinkiers. that's an overcrowding.
It doesn't look to me to be
any sort of misbehavior.
More police are being called for.
Reinforcements are coming from
the Forest end now to
attend to this problem.
As we got to the corner of the
pitch the center pen looked
absolutely crammed and I could
see there's too many people
in those middle two pens.
Then it was obvious there
was too many people.
This is going tits up. It's not a pitch invasion, it's
not public order, it is people
dying and in distress.
So, I open the pen.
Just carried on screaming and then all of the sudden I just
heard somebody say, come through
here, or, come here love, or,
and I was literally sort of
grabbed, sort of pulled.
And I found myself on the pitch with a camera on my face.
It was just a lot of fractured sort of breathing and people
rasping and people shouting and
a rising tide of panic,
and anguish, and anger.
[ yelling ]
I stood at the fence looking into the ground,
but I was looking long
sighted and there was a police
officer next to me.
We were just looking around and
he said, he's a goner, and he
pointed in front of him and to
my shock, about three foot in
front of me was this lad.
It was like looking at fish in a throwing net.
People were so crushed that you couldn't see the full
person if you like.
And that was just something that
will haunt me forever really.
All I could see was his
shoulders and his face and his
face was deep purple...
...and he wasn't breathing. I don't think he was.
And I thought, he's, oh my god,
you know, this is...
I just instantly... this isn't happening.
And I noticed there was just bodies everywhere.
A sea at the front of bodies.
It was seeing that you know broken, crumpled pile of people
and I just thought, Jesus.
You know, this isn't one or two.
This is a lot of people.
I looked over my left shoulder and I thought, I'm not doing
anything good here.
You could see that nobody could
get in through the gates that
were in front of those two pens.
But when I looked across to my right I could see
Sergeant Green, who was one
of my sergeants at the time,
hoisted a gate.
So, I thought, if I go in there I can just run along and get
into the pen.
Got in, but I couldn't
understand why these people
weren't moving towards me.
It was actually six foot
high spike rail fences
between the pens.
No wonder people can't move.
And I thought, well stupid thing having a spike fence.
But I thought, I've got to
get over that fence.
So, I jumped in.
It was like spaghetti. They were tangled up and I just
kept trying to rescue people,
get them out.
You see the same socks on,
well that's going to
be somebody's legs.
So you try to pull them out, but
you can't pull them out because
their arm's wrapped around
somebody else's leg.
You'd feel for a pulse, but the
tongues were so black and
swollen I thought, struggling to
get any air in there.
You'd see blue eyes were glazed.
By this time you could see
people were starting to be taken
onto the pitch.
But I thought, they're starting
to get their act together
and starting to
treat people outside.
So, I get over as fast as you
can and we were just
pulling people out.
When I'd come to it had all
eased off around me quite a bit
and I remember some fellow
saying, don't go down there,
get up off the floor.
So I got up, and as I turned
around I could see people
getting hoisted up into the
stand, and I didn't know -
all I thought was, just get out
of here, I've just got to
get out of here.
So, I put my hands up, and my
right arm wouldn't move
I'd crushed my right arm.
I got pulled up
just by my left arm.
I could see people pulling at the barriers, and
there's police, and people
on the pitch.
You could see all
sorts going on.
I've got to find my dad
because he's going to be
worrying for me.
How is he?
Worrying about how he was, but
I thought, he's going to be
worrying where I am, I'm still,
if I'm up here he's going to be
looking everywhere for me.
There was this big chap that
was being helped out, and
he's unconscious at least.
I really was the only
officer there, so I lifted
his T-shirt up.
I put my ear to his chest,
couldn't hear anything.
I think a St. John ambulance
chap came up and looked in his
eyes and he said, he's dead.
And so, I just lifted his
T-shirt over his face.
There was a big guy, he had a red shirt on, and he pulled it
over his head and at
that point you realize,
oh geez, he's dead.
Everyone around me was like,
no one's dead, no one.
You know, because no
one wanted to believe,
everyone was in denial.
I'd done some CPR training. I thought, well I'll go around
and see whether I can help.
I made a way out I was just
totally on my own, because
obviously everybody else was
focused on what was going
on down below.
As I walked down the steps, just as I got to the bottom
of the steps I could see my
dad lying on the floor.
My dad was outside the ground in like a concourse area.
There must have been another ten
bodies that were just
all lying there.
They're all covered over, but my
dad had a tattoo on his arm, and
I'd recognize him straight away.
Next thing I know there's a big crowd of police all around me.
It was surreal.
A line of police.
I don't know, forty, sixty, and
then there was people lying on
the floor and that's where
I realized they were dead.
The police were just standing there.
I mean why would you
just stand there?
And so, I went up to one
of the police and I said,
what's going on?
I said, why aren't
you doing something?
And he just sort of looked
straight at me.
And I says, how many, how many?
And he started sobbing.
I got, I just, I really panicked badly and ran away as fast as
I could from the ground.
Rowe was shouting to me in the kitchen, Marc, he's had this
trouble at Hillsborough.
And I'm just kind of doing
the sandwiches, and I was
all, where's Hillsborough?
So, I said,
where's Hillsborough?
She said, isn't that where
our Jimmy is, and James?
I said, no, they've
gone to Sheffield.
She said, Marc,
this is where the
trouble is, Sheffield.
I said, you've just
told me Hillsborough.
She said, that's the ground.
Now, one has to say that that is a segregated
part of the ground,
the Leppings Lane Terrace.
Liverpool supporters occupying
it and I can only assume that
there was overcrowding and
as they tried to come out from
behind the barriers, people at
the front were crushed.
I was really upset. All I knew, my three
were in there.
There are an enormous number of
police there but they clearly
haven't sorted out the number
of people who can't seem to
find any space.
I immediately rang Les
who was in work.
I asked him had he been watching
what was going on in Sheffield
on the television, he said yes.
I wasn't too worried because
Richard would never take the
girls down the front.
Just watching the screen, and I saw these people getting laid,
people laid on the pitch and
I thought I saw James.
And we sit at home, switched everything off and the minute
Les was home, we were
leaving for Sheffield.
People were getting pulled out on the pitch.
And I literally just stood there and just cried.
I didn't know what to do,
didn't know what to think.
In the back of my mind I was always worried about Tracey
because she'd fallen down.
And I thought, she's small,
she's more petite.
But Richard was stocky,
he was tall, he was a big lad.
And I never once thought
that anything would be
wrong with him.
I thought that if I've got
out he would get out.
But I was
concerned about Tracey.
It's pretty clear that there is no order coming from
the control box.
Intuitively it should have been
obvious that what was happening
was crushing and a safety
problem, and trying to
get people out.
What happens then, the control box is visited by Graham Kelly
from the football association
along with his assistant, and
for whatever reason, in the heat
of the moment David Duckenfield
tells him that there has been an
inrush of Liverpool fans forcing
entry through an exit gate into
the stadium and down the tunnel.
At that moment the person who is
ultimately responsible for the
hiring of the stadium is told
unequivocally that Liverpool
fans have caused the disaster by
violent access to the ground.
That's the message that within
minutes, even before the bodies
are pulled out of pen 3,
the world knows that the
responsibility for Hillsborough
lies in the actions
of Liverpool fans.
I've got an explanation for what's happened here.
I'm gonna give you a line.
The story emerges that one of
the outside gates leading into
that terrace was broken, people
without tickets got in, were
therefore overcrowding the
people with tickets and that's
why the crush occurred.
The lie that this is, when Duckenfield knows that he
ordered, agreed to the
opening of gate C,
the lie becomes defining.
It becomes the defining moment of the first phase of building a
case against Liverpool fans, who
from this moment onwards are
discredited in their actions as
coming to the ground without
tickets, forcing entry,
being violent, being drunk.
That whole process then feeds the myth.
The myth begins with the lie.
All emergency planning procedures have a core
element, which is the
declaration of emergency.
It is clear that no emergency plan was put into operation.
Everything that happens from
there on is ad hoc, but if you
don't have an emergency response
plan, that's when you have an
ambulance coming on the pitch,
another ambulance coming on
the pitch, ambulances arriving
outside backing up right
of Peniston Road.
They can't get past each other. You have ambulance officers
leaving their vehicles but
not leaving their keys,
so you've got them boxed in,
at the same time, you've
not got people coming
with stretchers, or people
coming with defibrillators,
or any other of the
standard processes that we would
operate in terms of emergency.
The fact that no emergency is declared in a situation where
people have only got a limited
time to be saved is an important
element of the whole process.
Don't be looking at them! You want to look at the fucking
police who are doing fuck all!
I remember going into ground, no sooner I'd be rushed into
ground, then we got pulled
straight back out again.
I just remember like
there being carnage.
We had to go to help get ambulances in.
Police officers' immediate response is to do
as they're told.
Their instruction is to place a cordon across the pitch so that
Nottingham Forest fans who might
interpret what's happening
as hooliganism don't come
onto the pitch.
That gives the appearance that the police officers
are caught in the headlights,
that they're doing nothing,
but that's their order,
that's what they're doing.
Some police officers who are not in that cordon who actually
had responsibility for that
end, they are actually
trying to rescue.
But the majority of people who
are involved in the rescue are
the fans who have managed to
escape the pens, who then
realize there are no stretchers,
there's no emergency procedure,
they become the emergency
helpers along with
some police officers.
I came out on to the pitch,
a bloke came up to me and
pointed to somebody on the
ground and I thought,
I'm gonna make him live.
He's gonna stay alive.
I think an ambulance man came
across to me and said I think
we can get this one.
So, we just grabbed him, put him
in the back of the ambulance.
I do remember we picked up a police motor bike escort
and we just headed to the
Northern General Hospital.
Got to Northern General, the staff were already waiting.
They got the gurney's
out, lined up.
Doctor with the pulse, eye tests, things like that
and said, Afraid this
gentleman's not made it.
That devastated me because I've never had somebody die literally
in my arms before.
I went down to the gymnasium...
...and there were just these lines...
...and lines of dead people.
Young people.
They were using the gymnasium as a temporary mortuary.
I've seen some sights in my life, but I've not seen anything
like that ever.
[ phone rings ]
I do remember getting a call from Terri, my mother in law,
pointing out to us that
something was going on in
Sheffield and she was very
distressed because Andrew
had gone over there.
It became obvious the longer it
went on that the only way
we were going to get any information at all was to
actually go over there.
We headed off on the Snake Pass and it was never ending.
First you were talking all the time, but then all conversation
just petered out and you just
couldn't wait to get there.
It was a horrendous drive up there, it was and Doreen was
going on in the background of
course, what do you think,
and all this.
I was absolutely convinced by this time that there was no way
he would have left Stephanie on
her own unless there was
something seriously happened and
I was hoping he was going
to be in a hospital.
That was my best hope for him.
But I was already assuming he was dead and I was driving
through wondering how the hell
are we going to get through
this, you know?
We were told to stand down and sit in the north stand looking
at this scene of carnage at
Leppings Lane, which is just
a few feet away.
We heard that there were confirmed 80 plus dead.
You know, police officer you're supposed to, your primary
duty is to protect life.
Not catch villains. Your primary duty is to protect
life and there were all these
dead people there.
Chaos broke out 5 minutes after the game started when the force
of people in the Leppings Lane
end of the ground forced fans o
climb the barriers on to the
pitch to escape being crushed.
The match was...
Early on was just a nightmare.
I saw a man having his chest pumped to try to save his life.
As you were going along
the numbers just kept
going up and up.
You know, every time it went up
everyone would just groan.
...an off duty policeman
to get to the ground.
The unofficial death
toll here is 74.
You just couldn't get home fast enough and by the time we got
back to Liverpool we were just
in a state of real shock.
In the chaos of Hillsborough, the coroner Stefan Popper is
called and he decides he's going
to attend the stadium where he
knows the majority of bodies
are being held.
He meets up with Professor Alan
Usher, one of the country's
leading pathologists who happens
to be based in Sheffield.
The coroner's hearing as is the pathologist,
the stories of the lie.
They can't be impervious
to that, it's on the news by
now and part of that
story is drunkenness.
And according to the coroner he makes a decision at that moment
that he's going to take the
blood alcohol levels of all who
died including the children.
Because he says, he assumed
that this would be
an important factor.
This is the first time it's ever happened in a disaster.
Yes, you would take blood
alcohol levels of a pilot in
a plane crash or a train driver
in a train crash or even people
driving cars, but the idea that
you'd take the blood alcohol
levels of all people
is absolutely unprecedented.
The pathologist agrees to
this and that is the first
establishment of the notion that
alcohol played a significant
part in Hillsborough.
We all went down to Lime Street Station to get James.
You're standing there and you're
waiting and you see the coaches
coming in and you just can't
wait to go to your son.
And the first coach come in,
poor people were getting off
there, they were in
a terrible mess.
I thought, he's not on that one
so, I said to the driver,
how many more coming he said,
oh, there's a few more
to come in.
Next one come in...
...no James.
We waited until the very last one...
And I thought, he's got to be on this one,
he's got to be on this one.
I was just ready to hug him.
I was desperate to hug
him and love him.
But the passengers got off there and I thought, Where is he?
Terry, Colin, and myself were shown to a hut.
It was the most tangible form of suffering of human beings
that I could imagine.
The atmosphere in that boys club was appalling.
Everybody in there was looking for somebody.
I was basically thinking they're going to take me to a hospital
and I'm going to find out that
Rick's injured, and I'll be able
to sit with him.
And it must have been getting to
midnight and the room
was slowly filling up with
priests and vicars.
There was more dark colors
than there was people.
It must have been half one o'clock to two in the morning.
A policeman came in, he stood on
a chair and he said that we were
going to be taken back to the
football ground and we were
going to look at photographs.
We all got on a double decker bus and it was freezing
cold as well.
It'd been so nice,
we were so cold.
I was pushing and pulling Leslie and asking him why.
Why are we going to
the football ground?
Why aren't we going
to the hospital?
Because Leslie knew.
We were taken into another room and told to stand there,
and we would be called in.
They wanted to just take my dad through I think but my mom said
she had to go with him.
They told me I couldn't come so
I stayed with the social worker
outside while they went in
to view the photographs.
And there was loads of them.
Photographs, Polaroid's. Small.
Very hard to see. Not split in any race, or color,
or sex, or age, nothing.
And I said, are they all dead?
And somebody nodded their head. And we went down, and down, and
down, down these photographs.
And fairly soon into that process I thought what
I saw in front of me was a
picture of Andrew.
I collapsed.
To be honest I didn't even recognize Tracey from the
photographs because her face
was so black and bruised.
I didn't even recognize her,
but I recognized Richard.
Without another word being said, two trolleys were brought in
and there was body bags
on the trolleys.
Leslie nodded his head.
They wheeled his body up on a trolley.
He was a mess...
...and I touched his face.
I went to bend down to cuddle him.
I wasn't allowed to. They said he was the
property of the coroner.
I brought him into the world, I needed to see him out...
...and I wanted to cuddle him. I didn't say goodbye.
I needed to, I needed that.
That was me that needed that.
I don't think they were gone that long really and
they came back.
I mean I knew from their face
and I just said, both of them?
He said, yeah.
That was that.
My mom was a wreck after the initial, both of them.
I don't know that I went quite
calm really to be honest when
the police officer said that we
had to give a statement.
So, you and your brother went to pub, you say?
A lot of the questions were about drink.
Had me mom and dad had
a drink on the way to
Sheffield to come to me?
Had I had a drink before
I went to the game?
Had we had a drink
the night before?
And I was going, well yeah,
yeah, I had a half a cider
at the pub today.
We had a couple of ciders last night.
I'm thinking, why am
I stating this?
And all the time he was tap, tap, tap with his pen.
When Terry was asked, did he smoke, she said no.
Did he drink?
She said no.
The next comment from the police
actually was, he'll be telling
us he was a virgin next.
And this unflappable
woman that was my mother
in law was flummoxed.
She could not respond to that.
When I was giving my statement
and they were asking me
about drinking I said,
you opened the gates you know.
I said, it was down to you.
I was making sure
they knew that.
But they weren't really
interested in that when
I was telling them.
Why are they attacking me? Why are they
attacking my family?
None of the family have
done anything wrong.
It was quite calculating.
Everybody was going through
the same thing and it
was just a process.
Let's get this done as
quickly as possible.
Done and dusted with these
statements, then we've had it.
We can say what it's
all about tomorrow.
It's all about the drink.
It was clear that he was under immense pressure to have an
initial report out which gave
some indication of what had
happened at Hillsborough.
I welcome the inquiry which is about to take place in which
will undoubtedly reveal the
true nature and cause of
this terrible tragedy.
I believe that when it's
completed, the actions of the
South Yorkshire Police will be
seen in a very different light.
After the Hillsborough tragedy, we hear in many of today's
newspapers that the police
have criticized the behavior
of Liverpool fans.
Police have claimed that drunken Liverpool football fans attacked
them as they tried
to help victims of
the Hillsborough disaster.
They say they were kicked,
punched and urinated on.
A lot of the fans, many, many hundreds of them outside
that gate had been
drinking very heavily.
People were, I use
the expression drunk.
They used a better
descriptive word about it.
The arrived very late.
Only a few minutes before the
game is due to start, 500 plus
were there without any tickets
and they were pushing and
crushing and very, very strong
and the police officers there
were virtually overwhelmed.
People were actually
lifting the police horse.
And they're diving into
the bellies of police horses...
Between each legs.
Now, anybody who does that
I don't care what other
people say, they're either
mental or they're drunk.
He said that they were urinated
on by people who were in
the balconies above them.
He said they were kicked
whilst they were giving mouth
to mouth resuscitation.
And all I've said to you is
honestly what was reported to me
by the officers on the
ground that night.
That happened to me on Saturday
and since then this story,
other people have added to it,
but it is a fact.
So, I have to accept that
what they were telling me
was the truth.
Here's the question I've always asked people when they've asked
me about the stealing from the
dead, the urinating on the
police and all that, I would say
to them, would you do it?
And no one's ever said yeah, and
they all go, no, and so then why
would you believe I did it?
Why? And if you're a journalist, why?
That's the first question
you've got to ask.
Would I do it?
Mmm, no.
I'm really glad that my name never appeared on a story
suggesting that happened
for two reasons.
One, it didn't happen,
and two, can anybody ever
really think that when
somebody's giving CPR to
somebody on a football field,
that somebody would go
and urinate on the back
of a policeman?
I remember at the time
thinking, that's nuts.
You're led, you've got a fight ahead of you.
I think the families
realized that more or less
from, straight away.
They were drunken hooligans that came through the gate and killed
their own and really that was
like a red rag to a bull to me
because my son loved life.
He didn't drink a lot.
He was well educated.
He was no drunken hooligan.
People do think that. They think that the people who
came in through that open gate
killed the people at the front.
But that's not true.
Three of us came in
and only I came home.
We were asked an officer's report first.
That is, what do you
remember of the day?
A lot of people put
whatever they want in it.
They're trying to express what
we're feeling at the time,
what the people's moods were,
things like that.
I said what I did and I put in what I thought was relevant.
The lack of radios, the lack of
command structure, the fact
that we seemed to be seriously
undermanned for the job
we were expected to do.
Signed it, submitted it, and that was it.
That was the end of it with me.
My position was a senior scientific officer
within the mechanical
engineering department.
We were called in to look at various aspects including the
turnstiles, how they operated,
how accurate they were, and what
turnstiles were allocated to
different parts of the ground.
We were just looking at the numbers.
We weren't looking
at how people behaved.
What we found was that the fans from Liverpool had to
go through a far fewer
number of turnstiles.
which shows that from about
10 past 2, they were coming
at a fairly constant rate.
Having seen the number of
turnstiles it was fairly obvious
that crowds would build up and they wouldn't all get in
the ground on time.
We looked at the influx of spectators through gate C,
the figure we came up
with was about 1,800.
The main conclusion was there weren't thousands of ticketless
fans because our total count for
gate C in the turnstiles was not
dissimilar from the capacity
of the western terraces.
Lord Justice Taylor today presented his interim report
just three months after
starting his inquiry.
The actions of the police
are severely criticized
in the report.
In fact, it says the main
reason for the disaster was
failure of police control.
On an individual basis, the actions of most police officers
inside the ground is praised as
heroic in ghastly circumstance.
The harshest words in the report are reserved
for chief superintendent
David Duckenfield, the senior
officer present who has been
suspended on full pay.
It talks of his failure to
take effective control of
the disaster situation.
He froze.
The thing about
David Duckenfield is that he
wouldn't wanted to have frozen.
He froze because it
was a human reaction.
The trouble is, if you're paid
to be a chief superintendent
then you're not paid to freeze.
You've got to immediately
act decisively to save lives.
He didn't.
So, was he the right
man for the job?
Clearly not.
The report says the officers lack leadership and as it
examines the disaster stage by
stage, it finds faults with the
decisions or lack of decisions
taken by South Yorkshire Polic.
In fact, sections of the report
are titled Lack of Effective
Monitoring, Blunder on
Opening the Gates and the
Crushing Not Recognized.
To me that was Taylor seeing through the way in which the
South Yorkshire Police had tried
to manipulate the story.
Taylor said the fans weren't to blame.
Drink played no part
in that disaster.
Yet I think families felt somebody's got to be
held responsible for this.
Didn't happen.
Didn't happen, did it?
The coroner has absolute independence.
Nobody tells the coroner what
the coroner should do and it's
decided by the coroner that
he's going to introduce a
cutoff of 3:15 on all evidence.
What that meant was anybody who died after 3:15, if there were
any other factors that might
have influenced the death,
that really wouldn't be
taken into consideration.
There was no absolute
science about that at all.
There was a lot of taking advice
from different sources, making
his mind up on the hoof, being
influenced by senior police
officers who were carrying
out the investigation,
West Midlands police officers.
It's clear that there's
somebody here struggling.
One of the concerns has also been the amount of alcohol
that was being consumed prior
to the match.
The indications are there wasn't
a lot taken in to the ground.
We did find 300 cans, I think we
counted, on the concourse, on
the inside of the turnstile.
But we've had a lot of evidence
that there was a lot of drinking
taking place prior to arriving
on the ground and indeed, we've
been plotting that in terms of
the pubs and off licences
and super markets.
There were some families who hardly missed a day.
We're talking here about
literally months of inquests,
traveling from Liverpool
to Sheffield and back.
Going up by train day by day
by day and the toll
that took on you.
At the end of it you were on your knees, really.
Before a jury he heard evidence
relating to each of the 95 who
died, one after the other.
The pathologist would come
in and give evidence.
How long it took to
die, what abrasions.
When the pathological evidence was given, the blood alcohol
level of that individual
was read out in court.
It was all about drink.
We hardly heard our
children's names mentioned.
I will never forget seeing the blood alcohol levels of each
of those people, including
children, were published
in the newspaper.
The issue of blood alcohol levels, the issue of
drunkenness, the issue of crowd
related violence, despite being
discounted by Taylor now rears
its head again and it
reemerges because it had been
Stefan Popper's decision to
take blood alcohol levels.
So the coroner, having taken a lot of advice came to a
summing up and very clearly was
moving in a different direction
to Lord Justice Taylor.
I remember Popper saying, now what we'll do, we will
read each individual name
with the verdicts.
John Alfred Anderson, accident.
And every name, accident, accident.
Just to see the reversal of Taylor, the reversal of
everything they believed to
be true and knew to be true.
Stupid. I'm looking back now and think,
how could you be so nalve?
How could you be like that?
But I was absolutely devastated.
I thought there was nowhere
else for me to go.
I came home and I think I sat in a corner and felt like somebody
had beat me with a big stick.
They left feeling betrayed, they
left feeling that the system had
completely let them down
and that this was the end.
I'm driving home from university one evening having
taught an evening class.
Very tired. Poured myself a cup of tea,
and there in my face is a guy
with long blond hair telling
the story about a disaster.
Immediately realized that A, he was a former police officer,
and B, been at Hillsborough.
And as he told a story of trying to rescue people and what
he'd done to rescue people,
it was clear that he had
suffered greatly himself.
Having gone through the process of trying to save life
and trying to intervene
appropriately, he'd been put
under an awful lot of pressure
to basically not tell the truth
as he had witnessed it.
He used the word sanitized.
And I was determined to find him.
I had nothing. After months I thought,
nothing's going to come
of this, and I just went
about my business.
And then I had a phone call.
And we arranged to meet.
We met in Hathersage above Sheffield in the Pennines,
a place I knew really well from
climbing and walking.
He told me his story.
He said, people weren't angels. Liverpool fans weren't angels,
but he was very clear that what
came next in terms of the way
the police had been treated was
about creating or producing
a new kind of story.
We met two more times after that, and on the third occasion
we were about to say goodbye
and he said, I'm just going
out for a minute.
And he came back with an A4 box file and he said,
have a look at that.
There on the top was his statement.
I kind of didn't believe what I was seeing.
Over fifty lines had been taken out, other words added.
Phrases like, "not a good statement for the
South Yorkshire police,"
and a covering letter from the South Yorkshire police
had admonishment services.
This covering letter used the words review and alteration
and therefore cemented those
words into the process.
That scrutiny of evidence was to actually look at evidence that
could be brought that hadn't
been heard before by any of the
inquiries or investigations,
but also to revisit the
evidence as existed.
By the time Stuart-Smith comes to Liverpool to meet families
and I go with the families,
they don't know that I have
knowledge of review and
alteration of statements,
but I held back.
[ over lapping voices ] There's quite a few areas...
Lord Justice Stuart-Smith, the ultimate in a figure of
the establishment who makes
a crass comment.
We should have walked
away right there and then.
We didn't because there
was still a fight in us.
Little did he know, we were
upstairs and I've been there an
hour before with me husband,
waiting upstairs for
him to arrive.
I found him quite patronizing.
Have you got new evidence? Well, wait a minute.
How can we get
you've got all what we've got.
How can you they're not
releasing it to us.
How could we get new evidence?
They're not releasing it to us.
Oh, you will need
new evidence for this.
But don't worry I will
look into your question.
Quite patronizing and, oh.
You're walking out and you think
this is gonna get us nowhere.
Very soon after meeting him with the families, I took the
police officer to meet with
Lord Justice Stuart-Smith.
Stuart-Smith was quite
astonished that this
police officer was
producing this evidence.
I felt he was hostile towards
the police officer and I made it
very clear to him I thought he
was hostile and he didn't take
kindly to that criticism.
In the new year in February the report came out.
With permission, Madame Speaker, I would like to make
a statement about the
Hillsborough Stadium disaster.
The overall conclusion which
Lord Justice Stuart-Smith
reaches is that there is no
basis on which there should
be a further public inquiry.
He concludes that none of the
evidence which he was asked
to consider added anything
significant to the evidence
which was available to
Lord Taylor inquiry or
to the inquests.
The entire country is united in
sympathy with those who lost
loved ones in Hillsborough,,
but we cannot take
the pain from them.
However, I hope that the
families will recognize that
this report represents, as
I promised, a most independent,
thorough and detailed scrutiny
to examine all the evidence
which was brought before it.
I'm now determined to access other statements.
I gain access to all of the police statements following the
realization that they were
being held in the House
of Lords reading room.
It is such a formal place.
Neat, tidy, leather-bound books, oak paneled, big trenchered
tables, a librarian
who was timeless.
The woman very polite looked and
said, Oh, Professor Scraton,
I think your boxes
are over there.
There in the corner, battered, torn, ripped, stacked one
on top of each other.
Not the filing
system I'd expected.
They were just statements thrown in upside down,
back to front, pages missing,
pages in other places.
Photocopies, but in no order.
I started to put them together as full statements and then
started to put each officer's
three statements together.
And I went through them, and it was exactly the same as
the police officer's statement
that I'd already seen.
There was a handwritten version,
there was a typed version, which
then had all the alterations on
it, and then a final statement
signed off that was pristine.
You could see visibly, clearly, the review and alteration
process there before you.
Here I am nearly ten years on from the disaster and we're
finding that the statements made
by all police officers after
Hillsborough have gone through
a vetting process, a review
process, an alteration process
Let's be clear what happened.
They were given paper on which
to handwrite their accounts,
warts and all.
They then went through an
editorial process involving a
team of six officers established
by the South Yorkshire Police
as the West Midlands Police
investigators were coming in.
Those statements were then transferred into clean
evidential statements which were
given to the West Midlands
Police office who knew that
they were inheriting a process
that at best was evidentially
ambiguous, and at worst was
a corruption of evidence.
And that was the final act for Hillsborough truth.
I'd almost completed the book, I'd written it in 12 weeks and
now I had this new chapter.
I called it
"Sanitizing Hillsborough."
The Sunday Mirror ran a two page headline stating clearly
the statements have been
reviewed and altered...
...and it led to nothing.
And then what unfolded immediately after was the
private prosecution of
Duckenfield and Murray.
11 years ago, David Duckenfield
was a South Yorkshire
Police Chief Superintendent
in charge of crowd
control at Hillsborough.
His deputy was Bernard Murray,
then a superintendent.
Today both deny two charges of
manslaughter or one of willfuly
neglecting to ensure the
safety of supporters.
The Hillsborough Family Support Group comprising those who lost
relatives that day have brought
and paid for this prosecution.
The private prosecution started
and you were up and down to
Leeds every day, families
travelling on a coach, we
were traveling on a coach
backwards and forwards.
When the jury returned they acquitted Murray and they were
a hung jury on Duckenfield.
We got on the coach to come home.
Nobody was talking. It was just this atmosphere.
We'd been knocked down before,
and we've come back up from it,
but I thought, there's no
coming back from this now.
That's it, it's finished for me,
I can't do any more.
You had to find a way to live the rest of your
life without Hillsborough
dominating every breath.
Julie and I had nowhere else to go with it.
We'd been looking for
justice from day one.
We'd been denied
it at every turn.
I think that was the final
moment of realization
that for the time being,
they'd been defeated.
After Lord Justice Taylor's report they had high hopes
that justice would be served,
and that didn't happen.
What they found was a system that could not
respond appropriately or fully.
What actually was happening was that they weren't believed
and all the time it was
self-pity city.
All the time it was, what
more do they want, when
are they going to get over it?
I've always called this the endless pressure and what
I witnessed was the distress
and depression associated with
injustice, that exacerbated
bereavement; deep, hurtful,
painful suffering over
a long period of time.
People taking their own lives,
people dying prematurely,
people broken by the
struggle for justice.
The price of Hillsborough is not...
...reducible to 96 people dying, the price of
Hillsborough is the
price of institutionalized
injustice, the appalling
treatment by some of the media,
of the good reputations of
innocent people, the cavalier
way in which wonderful
people were vilified.
That's the price of Hillsborough.
>> "30 FOR 30: SOCCER STORIES,"
PRESENTED BY PNC BANK.
[ SOFT, DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS ]
>> AFTER THE DISASTER, SOME OF
THE PLAYERS ATTENDED DOZENS OF
FUNERALS.
AND THE SUPPORT OF THE PLAYERS
SHOWED TO THE FANS THROUGH THOSE
WEEKS OF MOURNING.
I THINK A LOT OF THEM TOOK AN
AWFUL LOT OF TIME TO RECOVER
FROM THAT DAY, AND IT'S NEVER
BEEN FORGOTTEN BY THE PEOPLE OF
LIVERPOOL OR THE FANS, TO THIS
DAY.
[ CROWD SINGING INDISTINCTLY ]
When it was organized, that 20th anniversary, I always thought,
we've let them down, there won't
be many people there now because
we've let them down with
that private prosecution.
The 20th anniversary was one of those moments where I for one
thought, we will never
get justice, the truth will
never come out.
I didn't expect thirty odd thousand people.
Nobody in their right mind
would have expected that.
[ applause ]
I'd just like now to introduce the right honorable
Andy Burnham, the Secretary
of State for Culture,
Media and Sport.
[ applause ]
Until that time no politician had been allowed to stand and
deliver any kind of a statement.
Because it is a service of
remembrance, it is not
a political rally.
Hillsborough left deep wounds that will never heal.
Its horror is not diminished
by the passage of time.
Today, at the Prime Minister hs
asked me to convey, we can at
least pledge that 96 fellow
football supporters who died
will never be forgotten.
The crowd were offended by, not
him personally, but a politician
making what they assumed
would be an empty promise.
[ man in crowd: "Justice!" ] And he asked us to
think at this time.
[ applause ]
All the fans and supporters for years started the chant of,
Justice for the 96,
and we couldn't stop.
[ chant: Justice for the 96. ]
At that point reflection rolled over into anger.
I think that righteous
anger was overdue.
[ chanting ]
From that moment on, and I will say it was from that moment on,
that we got a lot more
than we've ever had.
It convinced Andy Burnham that he had to push this personally
along and set up the
Hillsborough Independent Panel.
When the panel was first in session and we met with the
South Yorkshire Police one of
the things that became very
clear, and in fact the phrase
was used, the panel in its work
would not find a smoking gun.
It could not have been
a more flawed assumption.
People started to arrive.
I went and met so many people that I'd worked
with for 20 years.
I also thought about...
I also thought about the people who went there, people whose
funerals I'd read the lesson at,
people who'd died recently,
people who I'd had respect for,
all of them even people
who I'd argued with.
Even at that moment I felt I couldn't tell them
because they were fearful...
...they were fearful that they were going to be
let down again.
When the bishop got up and the bishop said, I know what you all
are waiting to find out,
have we found anything new?
Three words I'll say to you all;
yes we have.
One of the big issues that had always been a problem
for the families was
the medical evidence.
We now know having revisited the
pathology on those that died
that over 40 people could have
been saved had they had
appropriate intervention the
minute they came out
of those pens.
Now I don't know whether James is one of them 41.
Quite frankly it doesn't matter.
96 people should
have been saved.
Having worked on Hillsborough for so many years I felt that
nothing would surprise me, but
I'll never forget the day while
the panel was in session that we
came across a document which
demonstrated that every single
person who had a recorded blood
alcohol level had had a
criminal records check run on
them by the police.
Their name, their address, the details, the alcohol level,
and what they'd
been previously convicted of.
That to me was the clear indication that from the outset
the police were determined
to criminalize those who died,
to damage their reputation.
I got to work and two of the guys at work said, Hey, you're
all over the internet.
I think you ought to take a look at this.
And they showed me the
statements I'd made,
my Hillsborough statement.
Well, there were two.
There was the one I made, and then there was a second
one with my name on it.
The one I made had got big lines crossing things out, entire
paragraphs, altering sentences,
altering phrases.
Everything that had been removed from my statement was
things where I'd been critical
of police command at
Hillsborough, and the statement
that had been submitted under
my name had been completely
sanitized, but you've got
my name on it.
That's when I found out that I weren't the only one.
Unless I forget my law, altering a person's statement is a
criminal offense without their
knowledge or consent.
If you get a group of people doing that part of our policy,
or as part of a strategy, call
it what you will, I might be an
old washed up bobby, but to me
that is still conspiracy to
pervert the cause of justice,
which is a criminal offense.
And I don't like criminals.
I just shiver down my back. I just wanted to shout
and scream there then.
Do you have anything to say
about what's happened today and
how you feel about it?
Got the bastards!
I honestly cannot believe some
of the things that they'd done.
The weight of what had been discovered and how far it had
gone and how far reaching it
was, it was like, yes, the whole
world knows now, this is the
truth and people have got
to listen now no matter what.
I knew it was going to be a cover-up, and it was,
we proved it.
Hopefully no one will ever ask me again to admit that I was
drunk, admit that I was part of
breaking down the gates, admit
that it was all down to people
like me, because it wasn't.
It had been said that they wanted the truth warts and all,
and I was able to say
there are no warts.
There is just the truth.
But I think that as an end in itself the panel's
work achieved justice.
I always wanted that verdict out of the way.
I've got what I wanted.
I'm more at peace with myself
now than I've ever been where
I think it's taking too long
and too much out of me
and out of my family.