Yesterday a Hard hitting report was published covering the Hilsborough disaster, one of the UK’s worst sporting tragedies, where 96 individuals died in a disastrous crush at the Leppings Lane end of the Hilsborough football stadium. Hilsborough was an old stadium, with a flawed design, and with a flawed safety plan, and with the addition of terribly flawed policing on the day, was a disaster waiting to happen. Police opened a gate to relieve crowd pressure outside the ground, which forced people into one of the internal crowd areas, and that led to a crush against fences and barriers.For a full view of what happened that day look Here for a view of the Incident, and here for significant exerpts from todays report
New details that have emerged from the latest report are that police activity Caused the crush, then ineptitude resulted in 41 of the people who died not receiving the proper medical attention down to police and other emergency services having poor planning for such a situation, and poorer implementation.
In the days following this disaster, police officers re-wrote their initial notes, to quote from the report "Some 116 of the 164 statements identified for substantive amendment were amended to remove or alter comments unfavourable to SYP." subsequent investigations have either managed to miss this entirely or fail to apreciate the scal of the changes.
As investigation into the cause of the tragedy commenced The local police started pushing out a selection of misinformation to distract from their failings. They put out claims that the police had been attacked by fans while they had been helping the injured, that fans had urinated on police who were helping, that fans had been drunk, and that they had been stealing from the bodies of the dead. All of these stories were pushed out through a local news agency, who didn’t pass it on until their reporters had been told this story by four separate senior policemen in the local force and by the local MP. all had provided the story unprompted, The Agency passed this story on but with caveats that it was suspicious of the story. Several newspapers reported this with appropriate questions for the police, The Mirror going as far as to say that the police were putting about a dishonest story. However the Sun, the Murdoch tabloid national Published the story in full with no dissent, under the Banner headline “THE TRUTH” and Rupert Murdochs attack dog Kelvin McKenzie has never lived this down
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