SSP Trade Union Organiser and lifelong Liverpool fan Richie Venton, who lived two streets from the stadium at the time of the disaster. This is Richie’s immediate response to yesterday’s Independent Office for Police Conduct report. Attached at the bottom of this page is an article by Richie on Hillsborough from 2012.
After 13 years’ deliberation, at a cost of £150m, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) report into the role of the police at the biggest sporting disaster in UK history has confirmed what most of us knew and argued 36 long years ago.
- 97 LFC fans were unlawfully killed – but nobody will ever face a minute’s jail time for what the IOPC concludes were the police’s “fundamental failures on the day” and “concerted efforts to blame the fans”
- Despite finding an extra 130 cases of police statements that were tampered with – bringing the total to 327! – and 110 cases of “falsehood and prevarication”, “discreditable conduct”, “abuse of authority” and “neglect of duty”, not a single police officer will face the consequences
- The IOPC Report named 12 senior police officers who would have faced charges of gross misconduct – but they will all walk away scot-free because they’d either retired or died by the time the IOPC investigation started in 2012 – itself 13 years after the deaths of 97 football fans who were then smeared, vilified and wrongfully accused of being part of a crowd who created the disaster
- Two of the South Yorkshire Police chiefs – Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield and his boss Chief Constable Peter Wright – SHOULD have faced TEN charges of gross misconduct EACH, according to the IOPC – but the law protected them from facing any consequences for their negligence, barefaced lies and torture of families of the 97 and survivors, many of whom have died with the stain of blame against the victims still lingering.
No wonder Charlotte Hennessy, whose dad Jimmy was killed at Hillsborough, concluded: “We’ll never get justice. Nobody’s ever going to go to prison for killing them.”
This IOPC Investigation was only into one of the guilty forces – the police. Younger readers need to also know about the role of the press – especially the scum rag, the Sun – football chiefs, politicians, the judiciary, and the reptile Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher, who sought to avenge her defeat at the hands of the working-class of Liverpool a mere 5 years earlier, and protect the police chiefs she’d so brutally deployed against the miners in 1984/5.
And resolve to never give up the struggle for Justice for the 97, for an end to a system that puts profit before people’s lives, for an end to the capitalist state that is rotten to the core.
Read my in-depth article from 2012 for more background: