Prevention and Cure
David Aaronovitch has a thoughtful and sobering piece on events surrounding the Hillsborough disaster in which 96 people lost their lives at a football match and a further 766 were injured.
One of the comments on the article describes it as a 'brave piece writing' which I agree with wholeheartedly.
Judge for yourself by following this link to The Times although the piece is behind the newspaper's paywall.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/the-hillsborough-disaster-started-years-earlier-q3ztx3s7p
Looking for scapegoats is no answer to tragedy
By David Aaronovitch - The Times
While police failures undoubtedly played a part at Hillsborough, the root causes of the disaster go back decades
I didn’t give up two years of my life nor hear 500 witnesses nor have to answer 14 key questions before coming to a conclusion, as the jury in the Hillsborough inquest did. I lost no one that day in 1989 and, not being a grieving relative, I didn’t have to endure attempts by the authorities to implicate the dead in their own terrible asphyxiation. So some people will feel that I shouldn’t say what I am about to: which is that the verdict of unlawful killing delivered the day before yesterday bothers me. I am troubled that we are in danger of placing the blame for the actual catastrophe — as opposed to the subsequent cover-ups — conveniently on a very small group of people and in so doing obscuring some important truths.
The central blame figure most people have alighted upon is David Duckenfield, now 71 and retired, but then a not very experienced chief superintendent with South Yorkshire Police. He was in charge of the police operation at Hillsborough. After the disaster he lied about key decisions made during the course of that day and the effect of his lies was to transfer blame from his own shoulders and that of the authorities to the fans themselves.
But what we are talking about here is not what happened afterwards, but what happened before and on the day itself. And my argument is that Hillsborough was the terrible culmination of a series of social and institutional failures and prejudices. More, unless we understand how those failures combined to cause the 96 deaths, we are fated in some guise or another to repeat the mistakes.
While police failures undoubtedly played a part at Hillsborough, the root causes of the disaster go back decades
I didn’t give up two years of my life nor hear 500 witnesses nor have to answer 14 key questions before coming to a conclusion, as the jury in the Hillsborough inquest did. I lost no one that day in 1989 and, not being a grieving relative, I didn’t have to endure attempts by the authorities to implicate the dead in their own terrible asphyxiation. So some people will feel that I shouldn’t say what I am about to: which is that the verdict of unlawful killing delivered the day before yesterday bothers me. I am troubled that we are in danger of placing the blame for the actual catastrophe — as opposed to the subsequent cover-ups — conveniently on a very small group of people and in so doing obscuring some important truths.
The central blame figure most people have alighted upon is David Duckenfield, now 71 and retired, but then a not very experienced chief superintendent with South Yorkshire Police. He was in charge of the police operation at Hillsborough. After the disaster he lied about key decisions made during the course of that day and the effect of his lies was to transfer blame from his own shoulders and that of the authorities to the fans themselves.
But what we are talking about here is not what happened afterwards, but what happened before and on the day itself. And my argument is that Hillsborough was the terrible culmination of a series of social and institutional failures and prejudices. More, unless we understand how those failures combined to cause the 96 deaths, we are fated in some guise or another to repeat the mistakes.
