Complaints about inaccurate recording of responses included witnesses identifying that some information they gave to WMP, which they believed was important, had not been included in the written accounts. This missing information included, for example, comments about their experiences at the 1988 FA Cup Semi-Final at Hillsborough Stadium and criticisms of the police operation. In another case, the witness recalled saying to WMP officers that he had seen other supporters “drinking cans of Coke” but in the questionnaire they had written that he “saw a few Liverpool fans drinking from cans.” As he noted to the IOPC, this completely changed the meaning. The IOPC agreed and upheld his complaint about the inaccurate recording of his comment.
Other complainants said that WMP officers had used words in writing up their accounts that the witnesses themselves would not have used. The IOPC fully accepts that this would have occurred. A witness account, whether a CJA statement or a questionnaire, does not have to be a continuous verbatim record of what the witness said, especially where the interview was not audio-recorded, which was the case with the interviews conducted by WMP. It was, and still is, common practice for police officers to use alternative forms of words, or to omit digressions and asides, to make the account easier to follow.
Given the length of interviews, and the fact that questionnaires were designed for information gathering rather than composition of a statement, it is perhaps inevitable that WMP officers sometimes edited what was said. As a result, most complaints about WMP phrasing accounts using different words to those the witnesses used have not been upheld.
Further, it is not clear that any amendments to the wording of witness accounts negatively affected the overall quality of evidence collected from Liverpool supporters. In particular, the evidence does not suggest that interviewing officers consistently and deliberately failed to record information about specific topics.
As an example of this, across all the questionnaires and statements WMP took from supporters, IOPC investigators identified more than 3,000 comments that were in some way critical of police actions on the day. While some pairs of officers recorded more critical comments than others, every pair recorded at least one.
This suggests that while it is highly possible that some criticisms of the police were not fully recorded, this was not the result of a systematic approach to avoid recording criticisms. In almost all of the cases where complainants raised this issue, the completed questionnaire did include some criticism or negative comment about the police operation.
