Retired Inspector Dukinfield is suffering from PTSD apparently.

Jay · Mar 12, 2015

Carlycu5tard said: ↑

I'm not following this closely so my question is not meant to be provocative - it's a genuine enquiry for your objective opinion.

Does the enquiry feel like it's genuinely uncovering new information which will change the worlds view of what happened that day or result in changes to policy and procedures which will save lives.

or does it feel like it is simply re-aligning the official view of what happened with what people already actually know. For instance the revelation (was it really a revelation) that Duckenfield only had 15 days experience in managing football matches isn't really going to precipitate a change police policy - I would imagine that a policy that match commanders should have at least X number of matches under their belt before being handed an FA cup semi-final would have already have been implemented as a result of the Taylor report.

The reason I ask is that the bits and pieces coming out on mainstream media - however terrible and infuriating - are not really unexpected - they are shocking - but not really suprising.. if you get me.
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Witnesses like Dukenfield are making the headlines, for obvious reasons, but the inquest runs every day with testimony from hundreds of people with a multitude of different connections to the disaster, including dozens of supporters, medical staff and police who amongst the injured and dying in the Leppings Lane End. It's becoming more and more apparent that the those who died weren't all dead straight away, that even after opening the gate and not preventing people going down the tunnel, mistakes continued to be made that cost lives. Not letting the ambulances on to the pitch didn't just look bad, it wouldn't have been a token gesture, it could have saved people.

Will this change the policy at football matches? Probably not. Since Hillsborough, football and the policing of it has got its house in order in terms of crowd safety (in this country at any rate). But there's more at stake than that. Without wishing to be callous, Hillsborough should have provided medical researchers the world over valuable data on how to deal with crush injuries, how long people survive, how they should be treated etc. It's very rare you have so many healthy people in one place dying of the same thing. Because of the cut off point in the previous inquest, the nature of people's injuries, how and when they died was never fully examined.

From a human perspective, the families should be allowed to know what exactly happened to their loved ones. From a societal perspective the truth must out so a cover up of this magnitude is never allowed to happen again.

All imho of course.

Extremely Northern · Mar 12, 2015

All that.

Gordon Ottershaw · Mar 12, 2015

I have it on good authority that some people were still alive when they were in the gym, which was acting as a morgue. Whether they would have pulled through is a different matter, but they certainly hadn't all died by the police cut off time.

Incidentally, the bloke who drove the St John Ambulance on to the pitch, after being told he wasn't allowed to by the police, is due to give evidence at the same time as my mum. It will be interesting if the beak asks him to repeat what he said to the coppers who were trying to prevent him from driving on to the pitch, as he had a certain way with words! You'll also be interested to learn that he was officially reprimanded afterwards too!!

Marlon · Mar 12, 2015

Re: Just a note retired Inspector Dukinfield is suffering from PTSD apparently.

Gordon Ottershaw said: ↑

Jesus, it doesn't bear thinking about how much worse Bradford would have been if there had been a fence on that stand, as most of the people in that stand were families and older people. But the main thing about Bradford was the age on the newspapers found understand the burnt out stand. It just showed the contempt for footy fans that the club hadn't bothered clearing up rubbish under a wooden stand for decades.

But, the fences is where it starts to get more complicated. The fences at Hillsborough were on the away end. To say I spent a lot of time working at that ground in the 80's and regularly went into the Kop to treat casualties, I really can't remember whether there was a fence on the home end. Away ends nearly all had fences though and there was a reason for that. In the seventies, more than a minority of football fans acted like animals, so without the fences there would have been mayhem at many matches. Liverpool fans were amongst the worse. In fact, I recall sitting nervously in the corner of the Kop at the semi final the previous year when a significant number of Liverpool fans climbed over the fences at the Leppings Lane End and went to the Kop to kick off with the Forest fans. The police eventually got that under control, as fortunately the Forest fans didn't get involved.

But this is where football fans have to take their part in the responsibility for the disaster at Hillsborough, not necessarily the ones there on the day (although had they turned up on time and queued like they would at any other type of event than a footy match the disaster would never have happened), but the behaviour of fans in general that led to the fences being there in the first place. Furthermore, I can guarantee you that the first reaction the coppers would have had when they saw Liverpool fans climbing over the fence would have been "oh no, not them again". So they would have approached the disaster area with the midset that it was the Liverpool hooligans kicking off again and that notion never left some of them, even when they realised what was going on.

Lets face it, that's the first conclusion we jumped to when the news filtered to Oakwell. A bloke stood near me on the Ponty had a radio and said there'd been a disaster at Hillsborough, crowd trouble, a wall had collapsed and they were laying the dead on the pitch. Well, you can imagine my reaction to that, with my mum, my girlfriend and my mates all there in a first aid capacity. It was only later that the full story emerged. But everybody's first reaction on hearing something had gone wrong at Hillsborough was to presume crowd trouble amongst the Liverpool fans. This undoubtedly helped the police when passing their untruths to the media, as it was a pretty easy conclusion to sell to the British public.

But as I always say, yes, a significant minority of football fans caused trouble at football matches, a lot of football fans turn up late with several pints in them, particularly for big matches like that, there were almost certainly a few people there without tickets trying to get in using whatever means necessary (remember seeing the scousers risking their lives climbing through the windows at Wembley 2 years earlier?) and football fans, particularly ones with a few pints in them, are unlikely to queue like the crowd would at an opera, BUT only one group of people were there that day being paid to look after the safety of all the people in the crowd. And what's more, I understand the police are, or were, all paid overtime for football crowd duties. It was the police who had the responsibility to take measures to prevent the build up outside the ground and there were numerous ways they could have done that. Similarly, at the point they opened the gate outside it was the only thing they could do to prevent someone dying outside, but they should have considered what would happen inside the ground once they did open the gates and put something in place to prevent a couple of thousand fans all marching forward into one, already overcrowded pen.

The comment Jay made further up is bang on, and exactly what I said to my missus yesterday. That could just as easily been any of us at that match, because the contempt from the football authorities, the poor state of the grounds and the contempt and incompetence from the police made it almost inevitable that something like that would happen one day. In fact, it nearly was us, at Stoke a couple of rounds earlier.
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Great post
That's exactly the point Gordon regards the policing etc .drunk,ticketless ,loutish fans were not a new phenomenon nor exclusive to certain clubs.
The great cover up is being uncovered bit by bit everyday the fact that this knowledge was surpresssed is the biggest crime of the lot and rests on the highest in the land then and now IMO.

MarioKempes · Mar 12, 2015

Re: Just a note retired Inspector Dukinfield is suffering from PTSD apparently.

Jimmy cricket said: ↑

Suffering from being a lying **** more like.

The Stoke 3-3 was a pretty hair raising experience remember trying to clear some space round an old bloke who was feeling ill and nearly getting crushed as a few toppled over
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I remember that game well. I recall commenting on the situation to our kid.

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