Hillsborough

[Kenneth]

Playing devil's advocate, there has to be a procedure for dealing with unclaimed sums. If there wasn't then money would just disappear into pockets. We don't actually know what happened to the money after that without records, but if it was donated then that would probably have come out. So an article asking 'what happened to the £14.53?' would be fair enough, but I'm not sure that SYP following the 'pay this into the finance department' procedure is really noteworthy.

[ChesterDave]

The money was found on the victims. It went to a police fund and not the victims fund. I think that is newsworthy enough.

[Kenneth]

Yeah, I don't think you understood my point, I probably didn't make it well enough.

[Phoenix07]

What an absolute tit.

Families of Hillsborough disaster victims today called for answers after new evidence emerged over the conduct of former police chief Sir Norman Bettison.

The ECHO can reveal a freedom of information request has uncovered phone records which appear to contradict the version of events Mr Bettison gave to the IPCC’s investigation into his actions after the publication of last year’s Hillsborough Independent Panel (HIP) report.

Mr Bettison, then leading West Yorkshire Police, claimed to be unable to respond to messages from his police authority two days after the report, as he had no mobile phone signal.

But now the ECHO can reveal the former Merseyside Police chief constable had been issued with a police phone, on which dozens of calls and texts were made that day.

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/hillsborough-police-chief-norman-bettison-5854854

[EwarWoo]

She says there's nothing they can do as he's no longer serving so cant be sacked for gross misconduct.

But surely if he was guilty of gross misconduct they should be able to retroactively sack the ******* and take his pension away?

How can he still be getting paid despite everyone now knowing what he is?

It beggars belief.

[RichC]

IPCC: Further 74 Hillsborough police statements 'amended'

Statements of a further 74 police officers involved in the Hillsborough stadium disaster "may have been amended", the police watchdog has said.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said there was also evidence suggesting "fans' witness accounts may have been altered".

It is examining police conduct in the aftermath of the disaster.

IPCC deputy chair Deborah Glass said it needed to deliver "the last, definitive account" of the 1989 disaster.

The announcement comes a year since the Hillsborough Independent Panel first reported its findings.

It found police changed statements and tried to blame fans for the crush, which killed 96 Liverpool supporters.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-24051314

[Leyton388]

More disgustingly shocking news but not surprising.

[RichC]

Hillsborough: Organisations could face criminal charges

Criminal charges will be considered once a fresh inquest into the deaths of 96 fans at Hillsborough has concluded
Manslaughter charges could be brought against organisations over the deaths of 96 fans in the Hillsborough tragedy, an inquiry boss has said.

Jon Stoddart said he was looking at the actions of South Yorkshire Police, Sheffield Wednesday FC, Sheffield City Council and the FA.

The retired officer said they were all being investigated for possible gross negligence manslaughter.

His team have found new evidence while going through thousands of documents.

The first priority for Mr Stoddart's inquiry, called Operation Resolve, is to provide evidence for the new inquest, which is set to start by 31 March 2014.

Unlawful killing

Once the inquest concludes they will concentrate on the criminal side of the investigation and eventually hand their findings to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) for consideration.

Mr Stoddart, a former Durham Police Chief Constable, said: "We are here to try and prove or disprove the unlawful killing of 96 people and clearly the DPP will have to make a very important series of decisions on this."

He said the coroner had given them three things to consider as a priority: the safety of the stadium, the movements of the deceased and the response of the emergency services.

Forensic scientists, pathologists, structural engineers and the Health and Safety Executive were among experts being consulted, he added.

He said: "We have definitely identified a significant number of people who we know have got a story to tell but who haven't provided us with a statement or an interview so clearly they are part of the priority, that we make sure that we are going to find these people.

"We have to go through all of the investigation and interview them and if necessary we'll take statements as well, but clearly we have got [to consider] the families, the police officers on the day, the work beforehand in the stadium, the design, the engineering, the changes that were made to the stadium, they're all part of the inquiry.

"The Football Association, why they decided to award the match, the semi-final, to Sheffield Wednesday, and the club, have got a certain responsibility as well so it's a very wide inquiry."

Mr Stoddart said the team was nine months into an inquiry which could take up to three years.

"It's a massive, massive investigation, it's the biggest criminal inquiry in the history of the English and Welsh police services.

"Some people have criticised the pace of the inquiry but we can't afford to rush anything here.

"This is so important. It's so important for the families, we have got to get this right."

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-24064118

[Phoenix07]

IPCC calling for Hillsborough witnesses

by TheAnfieldWrap // 17 September 2013 // 0 comments

LAST October, following on from the publication of the Hillsborough Independent Panel’s report, the Independent Police Complaints Commission launched an investigation into allegations of police misconduct or criminal behaviour during the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster.

This investigation is looking specifically at amendments to statements, the actions and conduct of South Yorkshire Police officers after the disaster, the role of West Midlands Police and those who investigated what happened at the time. This is the biggest investigation undertaken into police conduct in England and Wales and will be examining how West Midlands Police, the force appointed to accumulate evidence for Lord Justice Taylor’s inquiry and the subsequent inquests, conducted its inquiries.

Another strand of the investigation, Operation Resolve, is looking at the events leading up to the match at Hillsborough, as well as the disaster itself, with a range of organisations to be investigated , including Sheffield Wednesday FC, The FA and South Yorkshire Ambulance Service.

As part of their investigation the IPCC is requesting that witnesses who were at Hillsborough and gave their accounts of the disaster to police at the time to come forward.

Thousands of members of the public gave witness accounts to West Midlands Police, either in writing, via telephone or in face-to-face interviews and the IPCC wishes to speak with these people to understand more about their experiences and the process they went through.

96 people died at Hillsborough on April 15th 1989 at the start of the Liverpool FC v Nottingham Forest FA Cup semi-final.

Deputy Chair of the IPCC, Deborah Glass, said: “The publication of the Hillsborough Independent Panel and the unstinting determination of the families and survivors of Hillsborough families and survivors has set in motion the biggest criminal investigation into police misconduct in the history of England and Wales.

“As part of this, we are looking for the help of those people who were at the game as we examine how West Midlands Police conducted its investigation into the disaster.

“We want to hear from anyone who contributed to that investigation. If you gave an account what was your experience? Do you believe you were given the opportunity to reflect your experience at Hillsborough?

“We are not underestimating how incredibly difficult it will be to revisit the traumatic events of 15 April 1989 for survivors. For many, it was the worst day of their lives. We also understand it will be difficult for many people to trust us, after being let down so many times.

“However, it is a tremendously important part of the investigation and we can only do this with the help of those witnesses.”

If you gave an account to West Midlands Police, the IPCC would like you to contact them using their dedicated online form at www.ipcc.gov.uk/Hillsborough-witness-appeal. Those who don’t have access to the internet, or need assistance in completing the form, can call 0300 200 0003.

More information about the IPCC’s Hillsborough investigation is available at www.ipcc.gov.uk/investigations/hillsborough.

http://www.theanfieldwrap.com/2013/0...ugh-witnesses/

[Phoenix07]

SOS Aand IPCC leafleting outside Anfield.

http://www.spiritofshankly.com/news/ipcc-witness-appeal-your-help-needed

Supporters will be aware that investigations around the Hillsborough disaster are well underway. Recently, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) launched a witness appeal asking for those present at Hillsborough who didn't give an account and those who did give an account to West Midlands Police, to come forward. This is an important part of their investigation. Details of all this can be read here http://www.ipcc.gov.uk/page/hillsborough-witness-appeal

As part of our support for the investigation, we contacted the IPCC after concerns were raised to us that the witness appeal has not been heard by supporters who don't use the internet or may have missed the news coverage at the time. This is something that the IPCC recognise and are working on to address in the coming weeks. As part of this, we proposed to the IPCC, to which they have agreed, to carry out leafleting around the ground at forthcoming matches. We also contacted seeking Liverpool FC's support to put a leaflet on each seat inside the ground but this is something the club did not feel was appropriate.

Despite this, the leafleting around the ground will start at the Fulham home match on 9th November, at the request of the IPCC. This will allow their investigators to deal with all those who have contacted them first. We will be seeking volunteers to assist with this leafleting and details will be published nearer to the time.

In the mean time, we would urge all those who were present on that day to please get in contact with the IPCC. If you know of people without internet access who need to come forward, please speak to them about this.

You can fill in the online witness appeal form here https://secureforms.ipcc.gov.uk/Pages/form15.aspx

And response from the club to the SOS Union Liaison Rep.

Hi Kieth,

we have already been working on this.

The IPCC and a number of the lawyers who represent the families approached us and we worked with the IPCC on tannoy announcements, space in the programme, promoted the message via our tv, website and social media channels. We will continue to encourage people to come forward via our various communications channels but don't think leafleting the seats is an effective method for such a wide audience many of whom may not attend games

Best

Ian

[RichC]

His last sentence is quite poignant

Ian Herbert: Grief, sadness and a sense of guilt... the story of a street copper’s testimony to the Hillsborough investigation this week



You form friendships in unexpected places with this job and, considering that the starting point for a former police officer and me was a newspaper interview about the day which reduced his life to shreds, it has been surprising that he’s been willing to keep in touch. He was one of the junior officers who worked at Hillsborough on the day of the disaster, 24 years ago.

He and I have talked for long enough now for me to know the dismal details of how he, like dozens more street coppers policing the match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at ground level, fought against insuperable odds to make a difference. As we all now know, it was a day for which their commanding officers were not prepared. There’ll be a text message exchange between the two of us every now and then. It is usually when a Hillsborough development has come to light and nearly always when Sir Norman Bettison – a South Yorkshire detective chief inspector back then, but West Yorkshire Chief Constable when he resigned last year amid allegations that he abused his position in relation to the referral of his actions to the Independent Police Complaints Commission – is in the headlines. He knew Bettison from childhood as the lad from the Rotherham Road who went to the posh school.

He and I have talked for long enough now for me to know the dismal details of how he, like dozens more street coppers policing the match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at ground level, fought against insuperable odds to make a difference. As we all now know, it was a day for which their commanding officers were not prepared. There’ll be a text message exchange between the two of us every now and then. It is usually when a Hillsborough development has come to light and nearly always when Sir Norman Bettison – a South Yorkshire detective chief inspector back then, but West Yorkshire Chief Constable when he resigned last year amid allegations that he abused his position in relation to the referral of his actions to the Independent Police Complaints Commission – is in the headlines. He knew Bettison from childhood as the lad from the Rotherham Road who went to the posh school.

The latest call from my friend’s side of the Pennines, which came two weeks ago, was unexpected. He had been called for interview by the IPCC, he said. Would I go along with him for moral support? His many tales of camaraderie about old times in the force created the impression that those young officers who were left so traumatised by the Hillsborough disaster would have a social network to draw upon. But there is none. My friend thinks he knows of where one or two might now live, across South Yorkshire, but these people – mostly well into their fifties now – are generally carrying the memories on their own.

From the minute I pulled up outside his stone-built terraced house I knew why he had needed someone with him. He was already outside on the pavement waiting, nervy, just talking, talking. He’d not slept well. “Time to go, isn’t it?” I suggested, several times over, as the clock ticked towards 10am: the interview start time. He seemed to be struggling to face up to this.

The drive out to the interview took us past the site – landscaped and covered with soulless metal warehouses now – where my friend was on the police front line against South Yorkshire’s miners in the legendary Battle of Orgreave, at the height of the strike, 29 years ago. He’d previously done a brief stint working in the Treeton Colliery himself – and so had his father – so he received some stick after Orgreave. He took it. It was all water off a duck’s back to him and he thought it always would be where his police work was concerned, until that day he went to Hillsborough.

He was calmer by the time we arrived at the pre-agreed place for interview – a meeting room in a new, anonymous hotel on the outskirts of town – and the interviewers immediately contributed to the sense that this might be more productive than he had hoped. Their firm and unflinching push for information was tempered with the kind of emotional intelligence absent in the many communications from investigators in the immediate aftermath of 15 April 1989.

My friend began to construct for them a coherent narrative of what had happened. It has become a very familiar narrative to me, ever since he began describing the experience to me in detail, about a year ago, though the most telling aspect was where it – and he – came to a broken halt.

His testimony across over six hours of conversation included the recall of many vivid recollections of that day. There was the particular jocular conversation with a Liverpool fan beforehand. The camera crew which was unfathomably allowed to film officers as they gathered in the stadium hours after the disaster. The officer carrying a child in his arms across the perimeter of the stadium. A fellow officer sobbing in the station the following day as they clocked in for a 2-10pm shift as if nothing had happened.

But then the acute memory of his own designated role that day, guiding Liverpool fans towards the Leppings Lane turnstiles, where they died, jolted him severely, quickening the guilt and the grief which are never far from the surface where Hillsborough is concerned. He blames himself. We broke off, took some air, resumed and the narrative was flowing again before the next jolt, which came where I had thought it might.

It relates to a thought – rather than an action, or inaction – he has told me about before. In the febrile aftermath, when Liverpool supporters who had heard boos and taunts sound from the opposite terraces while dozens of their own died, he believed police officers were about to be set upon. He told himself then that the act of last resort would be to jump into the river Don. It wasn’t an onslaught. Nobody needed the river. And he has never been able to forgive himself for contemplating bailing out.

The day meandered on and so did his story, with the growing sense that the responsibility for these interviews has been put in good hands. Darkness had fallen by the time he put on his coat and stepped out into the chill South Yorkshire night. It brought a sense of relief that this was over – but no sense that all questions had been answered and a door finally closed.

Before the interview, my friend was sent a version of a statement he made in the aftermath – with his critical comments removed. The four pages of the revised statement, professionally retyped 24 long years ago, each had his signature at the bottom. He would not have considered signing a statement without reading it, he said. He believed the signatures were superimposed. Yet the statement process was going on when he was suffering the beginnings of post-traumatic stress disorder. He was getting through each day with tranquillisers at that time. Was he too traumatised to realise what he was signing? He can’t entirely rule out that possibility – extremely remote though he thinks it is.

There will be plenty more officers like him, for whom this could all have been dealt with – and, to an extent, put away – a quarter of a century ago. Next year’s reopened Hillsborough inquests may very well tell us that not all of those working the streets and the turnstiles at Hillsborough that day were saints. It may also conclude that not all senior officers were villains. For now, the quiet grief of those asked to bring order from the chaos in anonymous hotel rooms throughout northern England will be painful to behold.

And if that is the experience of the once-young officers, who can possibly imagine what the families of those 96 who died are going through as they are asked to recall it, retell it and relive it?

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/ian-herbert-grief-sadness-and-a-sense-of-guilt-the-story-of-a-street-coppers-testimony-to-the-hillsborough-investigation-this-week-8943405.html

[Frenchie]

http://www.theguardian.com/media/201...rupert-murdoch

[Phil]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/sports-...ality/25357425

Pity it didn't happen last year when she could have been there

[RichC]

Hillsborough disaster survivors 'threatened by police'

3 February 2014 Last updated at 17:00 By Peter Marshall BBC Newsnight
"John" recalls Hillsborough: "I had to stand on him to get out"

Survivors of Hillsborough have said they were intimidated and threatened by police from the independent force asked to investigate the football disaster.

BBC Newsnight has heard that witness criticisms of police who had been at the scene were not properly recorded.

This is the first time fans have come forward to question how West Midlands police took their statements.

The force declined to comment pending ongoing inquiries and the forthcoming inquests into the deaths of 96 fans.

The Liverpool fans died when a crush developed on an overcrowded terrace at Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough ground, during an FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest in April 1989.

The Hillsborough Independent Panel reported 18 months ago that 164 accounts from South Yorkshire police - the local force - had been changed, apparently to shift the blame for the disaster from the police on to the fans.

Nick Braley, who was a teenage student at the time, said that when he told West Midlands officers three weeks later that South Yorkshire police failings had caused the disaster, he was told he could face prosecution.

'Scared, traumatised'
He says he was "scared and intimidated" by a West Midlands officer.

"I'm a 19-year-old boy, three weeks out of Hillsborough, traumatised, and he's threatening me that he's going to put together a case for wasting police time because he didn't like my evidence," he says.

Newsnight has found that his experience is typical of those cited by a number of Hillsborough survivors.



Some of the West Midlands officers seemed to regard them not as vulnerable and invaluable witnesses keen to make truthful statements, but more like suspects.

"John" - not his real name - was 17 when he went to the match.

He struggled to survive in pen three, behind the goal on the Leppings Lane terrace.

At one point he lost consciousness and came to among the dead and dying.

"I remember standing next to a guy with dark, greasy hair, obviously from the sweat. We were totally pushed against each other in such a way that it's impossible to describe," he says.

"It was just me and him fighting for our lives. And I don't know if he was one of the 96 [who died], but I know that I had to stand on him to get out."

'I was broken'
Once on the pitch, John helped carry bodies to the gymnasium before collapsing. "I was broken," he says.

He tells how when two West Midlands officers arrived to take his statement at his home in Huyton, Merseyside, they sent his parents out.

John told them of police mismanagement at Hillsborough and how he planned to join the police to help prevent anything like it recurring.

According to John, the officers refused to let him read his own statement, saying, "I've written what you told me. All you need to do is sign this now."

He says he felt physically intimidated and powerless as the pair stood around him. He signed.


Nick Braley went to the semi-final as a neutral, excited to have been given a ticket by a friend.

He says the officer taking his statement was not impressed.

"I'd been wearing a Free Mandela T-shirt," he says.

This prompted aggressive questions. "Was I a student agitator? Was I a member of the Socialist Workers Party? I'm just a fan at a game of football. He then turned on me and said I was a criminal with a grudge against the police."

At one point, he says, the police suggested he had not even been at the game. When he produced his ticket, he was told he could have found it.

Professor Phil Scraton, of Queens University, Belfast, who was the main author of the Hillsborough Independent Panel's report, which led to the scrapping of the 1990 inquest verdicts and the setting up of two fresh investigations, believes many witnesses were subjected to what were effectively interrogations.

'Suicide attempt'
He sees a clear parallel between the way South Yorkshire police questioned the bereaved on the night of the disaster - asking whether they or those they had lost had been drinking and checking for criminal records - and the statement-taking of the West Midlands force.

He says both forces shared the same mindset and this has deepened the trauma for survivors.

For John, what he calls "survivor guilt" reached a peak 15 years after Hillsborough.

He was a detective in the Metropolitan Police's murder squad, frequently blotting out his feelings about Hillsborough with drink.



By 2004, overwhelmed, he attempted suicide by driving his car into a tree. He resigned from the force after a disciplinary hearing.

Following the independent panel report, he finally got to see the statement he was refused sight of 25 years ago. He says there were no surprises: "It's as I thought. It's not my account." He says it even places him in the wrong part of the ground.

Nick Braley also feels his statement does not reflect the truth. He's also now got access to internal West Midlands police memos and notes referring to his case. And there, handwritten, are the lines "came across as totally anti-police... at first doubted had been at the match".

And then there's his Nelson Mandela T-shirt. "Was wearing a 'left wing' type 'T' shirt, actual motif not known."

Watch Peter Marshall's film in full on Newsnight on Monday 3 February at 22:30 on BBC Two, and then afterwards on the Newsnight website and BBC iPlayer.

[Cormack74]

Just read that on the BBC site. ****ing shameful.