Hillsborough disaster survivors 'threatened by police'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25947994

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.

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"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.

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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.

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news...ivors-threatened-prosecution-pointing-6664499

 

Its just part of the overall coverup, the police investigating the police was always going to result in a whitewash, but looking at the tactics used its disgusting that these so called men of integrity abused their positions to save the criminal actions of another force.


One or two of those guilty cops will be strung up by the bollocks and shunned by those they lied for but its Bettison I want to see facing a judge for the many crimes he committed to gain promotion the ****.

 

The more that comes out the more that everyone else knows who the real scum are (we already knew obviously). The likes of "Sir" Norman will have to face the music eventually even though it's a painfully slow process. Disgusting, vile criminals (who are getting us to pay their pensions too....alright for some eh)

 

More and more will come out before we get to the end of this. If anyone missed the programme it's available on iplayer.

 

What troubles me is, that if the accounts are true, then the Police officers involved are clearly following an organised and pre-meditated formula to discredit witnesses. This was not some heat-of-the-moment defensive reaction from the guilty parties, it was obviously much more calculated and cynical than that. It calls into question not just the integrity of individual officers, but methods and objectives of the Police as an institution as this is clearly a policy of the force as a whole, and not just individuals.
Of course we've had plenty of evidence of corruption before, but you do wonder whether there's been any improvement since.

 

saint, that "pre-meditated formula to discredit witnesses" is institutionalised. If you look at the psychology that they employ in all of their actions, their first 'duty' (as they see it) is to build a case against you rather than to seek the truth. Sadly Hillsborough is a classic example of that psychology being misused to protect the police themselves.

 

The way people were treated was a disgrace but there is nothing in this article that we didn't already know TBF. However, this but...

...is new to me. How the hell did they think they could get away from sending parents out of a room? Never mind actually pulling it off or getting away with it!!! Utter ****ing disgrace.

 

Listen to the lads explanation

 

I did read it, I was talking about the officers / police force mentality of sending a lads parents out of the room.

 

Part of the psychology referred to above.

 

Dave your right.

Not remotely comparing incidents (obviously) but Look at the London MET reaction to plebgate.

I mean in the same year where Hillsborough was so high profile and the role the police played in it so condemned, another force's immediate reaction to a somewhat minor fracas was to lie and cover up from individual officer to institution, to the point they forced the resignation of one of the countries most senior elected officials. And then continue to deny and lie despite overwhelming evidence that they were doing so.

To put that much effort into such a little spat tells me I wouldn't trust any force with being transparent in investigating their role or fellow forces role in major incidents on the scale of Hillsborough. It's default position every time.

 

I once accompanied a friend to a police station for moral support as he'd never been in one before and was apprehensive. When the officers took him off to take his statement I was left in the waiting room. A short while later 2 officers asked me to step into the corridor and asked me some general questions. However, after a few minutes I became uneasy as the nature of their questions had changed.

Now, I have never studied investigative techniques but I have taught and studied communications technique to a point where I was aware that I was being drawn into the investigation by association and unguarded self-incrimination. At that point I made clear that I knew nothing more and wouldn't be answering further questions. I was led back to the waiting room but the atmosphere was very chill!

BTW my friend was only giving a witness statement.

 

It's the inherent risk in any police force. Their task is to protect the public. Unfortunately the threat to the general public comes largely from within the body itself. The lazy approach is to consider the entire body the threat and approach accordingly.

It's why, convictions of living senior police officers is what needs to come out of the new investigations. But it won't.

At the very worst, the sentence for lying as an officer has to be prison, and the sentence should be bigger the higher the rank of officer that gets convicted. It should be the one unassailable truth to any police force. Though shalt not lie.

Not going to happen though.

 

Please God some of these vile bastards get what's coming to them, particularly Bettison, the utter ****.

 

It happened on Thatcher's watch and like the miners strike and CMD demos "leftist" politics were made an unwritten crime, even a kid "wearing a tshirt with an unknown leftist logo"was discredited, shows just how low the West Mids police stooped to protect their own and the government of the day.

 

This is the bottom line. The police are above the law. There will inevitably be scapegoats, but they will be treated with kid-gloves. I learnt long ago that you can't touch the police, they are a law unto themselves. I have friends who are coppers and I tell them that, too, ad nauseum. Damn filth!

 

Police officers caught lying do get sacked and if their lies are deemed to be perverting the course of justice they get sent to prison.

However, it only tends to be the junior officers, never the senior ones who are allowed to resign with their pensions intact.

Hillsborough went to the very top with a cover up ordered from day one. Even some police officers who gave statements then found the statements had been altered, or they were asked to redraft them, with the threat that life would get very uncomfortable if they didn't.

The problem with the Police force is that an honest police officer will never rise to the top, as the very senior officers are nothing more than politicians in uniform, and therefore have the morals of politicians.

 

Have you heard the latest. Barristers for certain of the coppers are on about bringing up blood-alcohol levels again at the new inquest. ****ing filthy, dirty scum of the earth

 

I went on a CND march in London in 1981 when I was a teenager. Two of my very good mates from school (still friends to this day) were just starting as coppers at my local nick at Eaton Rd. They were shown photographs of all local activists on the march, and pissed themselves when the saw me. Apparently Special Branch, as it was then, had suspected I was on the demo as I paid my CND membership through direct debit with the Natwest.

My poor ma was utterly mortified. She loved the police, her uncle had been a policeman, my granddad had been knocked back by the police because he'd been caught 'scrumping' when he was a kid, and we were considered a police-friendly family. I still support the police and would be proud if my daughter joins them, as is a possibility. But my mates had to explain to my mum that I wasn't a terrorist and that the state in general, and the police in particular, were monitoring millions of its citizens even then, 30-odd years ago, who just happened to be doing something that a foreign power, in this case the US, didn't like.

And that's another thing that vexed - two of the things I'd been brought up to respect; the police and the US (especially for the space programme) turned out to have feet of clay. As said, I still support the police and I am aware that, outside the Commonwealth, the US is as good a friend as we have, but it was the end of the innocence for me.

 

Sorry Donga. I've seen the police behave terribly too many times for me to have anything but hatred for them. And I DO tar all of them with the same brush. Even DCI Frost