The twenty-first century Hillsborough Inquests have finally reached their long awaited verdicts – unlawful killing of the 96 Liverpool fans who turned up to an FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest at (neutral) Sheffield Wednesday’s ground in April 1989 and never went home. To paraphrase the mid-90s football anthem Three Lions by Ian Broudie/David Baddiel/Frank Skinner, this ends, though doesn’t necessarily resolve, 27 years of hurt. The Inquests are self-contained and don’t legally have to result in further legal action but it is already clear from statements by law firms representing the families of the victims that this is only the end of the beginning. South Yorkshire Police (in whose force area Hillsborough lies) and West Midlands Police (who carried out an investigation at the time) are in the lawyers’ sights as the enormity of the consequences of the verdicts sinks in. The very existence of South Yorkshire Police as a single entity is in doubt.
I remember vividly sitting in my car listening to the radio on the day of Hillsborough, and hearing the live unfolding of the tragedy, within minutes consuming with all other listeners the lie that had been put out by the police match commander David Duckenfield and repeated for the media by Graham Kelly of the Football Association that Liverpool supporters had forced gates which led them into the Leppings Lane end of the ground which had caused the unfolding disaster. This (wrong) label stuck for 27 years. It was Liverpool football hooliganism what done it! And The Sun with its hateful front page compounded the lie. I was listening to the radio that afternoon in Stockport, Greater Manchester, as an avid (Manchester City) football fan but also professionally as a nationally known socio-legal studies and criminology academic. In the 1970s and 1980s I had conducted ethnographic inquiries into football fandom in the North of England and witnessed personally many incidents of overcrowding in the pens and cages that existed at many different grounds in those years. Years after Hillsborough as part of this research work I remember sitting watching one game (Sheffield Wednesday v Blackburn Rovers) in the (away end) Leppings Lane (lower) seats which had replaced the haunted terracing and just feeling a chill throughout the whole 90 minutes. Many times in the 1970s and 1980s there were mini-Hillsborough type crushes where you would be swept off your feet by the pressure of the crowd. I am a 6 foot two big bloke but there were many times I came home from incidents in this research period feeling there but for the grace of God go I. Part of the work had been initially to look at the effects of the Safety of Sports Grounds Act 1975 which gave rise to the penning and caging of football fans. I did a great deal of work with police forces – especially Greater Manchester Police – who generously granted me great access to their matchday preparations – from the briefings on the morning of the match all the way through games to post-match. In the wake of Hillsborough I was asked by GMP at Sedgeley Park in Prestwich to advise national police match commanders on how they should change their strategies so that nothing like that ever happened again. I emphasised to them that the common police interpretation of crowd ‘disorder’ as caused by football hooliganism (a mistake which I had often witnessed in the research) had to be jettisoned and a new approach based on crowd safety adopted.
27 years later, and thanks to some unbelievably sustained, often unsung, sterling work by my criminology and journalistic colleagues, people like Professor Phil Scraton of Queens University Belfast and David Conn of The Guardian, the twenty first century Hillsborough Inquests verdicts have been at last delivered. 27 years of hurt – as the political chant goes, sung with gusto by the families of the victims outside the court in Warrington to the watching world’s media, ‘justice for the 96!’
