A 12-year inquiry has found no senior police officers were guilty of misconduct for falsely blaming misbehaviour by Liverpool fans for the FA Cup tragedy that killed 97 people in 1989
Families of the Hillsborough disaster victims are “livid” after a 12-year inquiry found no senior police officers were guilty of misconduct for falsely blaming misbehaviour by Liverpool fans.
The police case was wholly rejected in 2016 by the jury at the second inquest, who determined that no behaviour by Liverpool supporters had contributed to the disaster. The tragedy took place on April 15 1989, at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium.
The jury found that the 97 people who had died due to a crush on the Leppings Lane terraces were unlawfully killed. This was as a result of gross negligence manslaughter by the officer in command, Ch Supt David Duckenfield.
Bereaved families and survivors have fought a long campaign for truth and accountability, and have always said South Yorkshire police mounted a false case to minimise their culpability and blame the victims. The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), has now concluded its own investigation which first started in 2012.
In a letter notifying bereaved families of its findings the IOPC said it had found no case to answer against senior South Yorkshire officers investigated over claims they had given inaccurate, false or deliberately misleading evidence or “irrelevant criticism of fans’ behaviour”.
Louise Brookes, whose brother Andrew, 26, was one of the 97 people killed, said she was “livid” at the IOPC’s conclusions. She pointed out that in 2021, South Yorkshire police and West Midlands police, who were brought in after the disaster to investigate, agreed a settlement with families and survivors for misfeasance in a public office, based on a claim that the forces had perpetrated a cover-up. She said: It feels like a cover-up of a cover-up.”
The IOPC did find Duckenfield and three other senior officers culpable of gross misconduct for failures at the semi-final. Duckenfield was also found to have committed gross misconduct for the lie he told at 3.15pm as people were dying, falsely telling his senior officer, assistant chief constable Walter Jackson, and football officials, that Liverpool supporters had forced open an exit gate.
In fact Duckenfield had himself ordered the gate to be opened, to relieve a crush outside the Leppings Lane end turnstiles. Following an independent police investigation for the IOPC termed Operation Resolve, 11 separate elements of gross misconduct by Duckenfield were found, including for ordering the opening of the gate and failing to safely direct the people who came through it.
Duckenfield did not order the closure of a tunnel leading to crowded central “pens” on the terrace, and the lethal crush developed after people who came through the exit gate went into those pens
Jackson was found culpable of gross misconduct for failures of planning and his response to the disaster; former superintendent Roger Marshall for crowd management outside the Leppings Lane turnstiles and for asking Duckenfield to open the exit gate.
Former superintendent Bernard Murray, Duckenfield’s second in command in the police control room, was also found culpable of gross misconduct.
Duckenfield was prosecuted for gross negligence manslaughter after the inquest; he was acquitted in 2019.
Senior officers were cleared over the instruction to officers not to write their accounts of the day in their official police notebooks, and a subsequent process of amending the accounts made by officers.
One officer, former detective chief inspector Alan Foster, was found culpable of gross misconduct, following an investigation into whether senior officers had put “undue pressure” on some other officers who refused to alter their original accounts.
A complaint was upheld against an officer on duty in the control box, PC Trevor Bichard. He was found to have deleted from the evidence provided to the 1989 inquiry by Lord Justice Taylor a log entry which recorded that at 2.55pm an officer had requested the tunnel leading to the central pens be closed.
Mervyn Jones, the then acting chief constable of West Midlands police, was also found culpable of gross misconduct for instructing the deletion of “policy files”, and retaining policy books “in his personal possession” after he retired. No officers will face misconduct proceedings, the IOPC previously said, because they have all retired.
In a letter to families last month, the watchdog said that while South Yorkshire police did seek to “deflect the blame from themselves”, with no duty of candour required the force “was entitled, within the law at the time, to present its ‘best case’ and be selective with the evidence it presented”.
