South Yorkshire Police Football Supporters IAG

I was invited to the inaugural meeting of South Yorkshire Police's Football Supporters Independent Advisory Group. The basic principle is that each club will be represented by its own small selected panel of volunteers as well as club safety officers to meet with SYP on football-related matters and provide advice to the Football Unit in the role of a ‘Critical Friend’ to support tactical policing delivery as well as to feedback any observations from fan bases on policing tactics.

They said they need to be better at communicating with football fans and hopefully, some progress can be made on this as part of this forum.

We had a representative from the West Midlands IAG who gave us an overview of how they work, and the success they have had and it sounds like a worthwhile way of improving cooperation and understanding between fans and the police.

There wasn't a lot of operational discussions last night, it was more about getting the group up and running although one or two bits of information were quite interesting. For example, how SYP football unit had worked with some success at tackling the explosion of young and daft fans that were being a nuisance a couple of years back by targetting groups of kids and educating them in schools (with our CEO) and also educating their parents on what they were getting up to
There's another scheme that provides an alternative to banning orders for young fans again through education etc. I think we'll get more info on these kind initiatives going forward.

Will keep you posted for the next one in a month.

 

This was answered at the last fans forum meeting. There is a recommended segregation between fans as advised by the safety advisory board (not just the police). If we were likely to sell those areas then this segregation would come out of the away fan allocation. ie We could sell the last block of the east stand lower and the required level of segregation would be made up of seats at the end of the North Stand.

The west stand isn't used currently as there aren' toilets etc since the work was done for the new media building. It was said that that could be rectified if we needed those seats at some point in the future. Paul Conway pointed out we don't have don't currently have a supply problem and they need to work on improving demand for tickets.

 

I think the point is that if there was the demand something different would be agreed but right now they are derisking any potential issues/flashpoints by removing seats that we don't actually sell. (with memories of what happened against Leeds not all that long ago)
Another point is that some of the restriction in the North Stand is down to evacuation timings as well not just segregation

 

Yeah but didn't we have a safety issue with the roof?