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WMP’s initial steps

  1. A team of WMP officers first arrived in Sheffield on 18 April 1989. Early steps included securing the stadium as a crime scene, setting up an MIR and meeting with some of the senior SYP officers who had been involved in collecting evidence up to that point. During that morning, CC Dear took part in a press conference with Lord Justice Taylor, which explained the remit of the Inquiry and WMP’s role in it.
     
  2. At 2pm, ACC Jones recorded a policy decision that “the limits of the South Yorkshire Police enquiry should be to the preservation of evidence and no further.” He then expanded on that in a subsequent policy decision the same afternoon, which again focused on “preserving evidence”; he added that no interviews would be undertaken at that stage.
     
  3. On 19 April, WMP began to take over the investigation. The transition took a few days to complete. In a later letter to the South Yorkshire Joint Secretariat (the body that provided shared services, such as legal services, to various public authorities in South Yorkshire), Ch Supt Denton recalled that on 20 April, Detective Superintendent Roy Taylor of WMP (D Supt Taylor) instructed that all enquiries by SYP officers must be suspended. On 22 April, the SYP HOLMES account was closed and all data backed up to tape. The tapes were handed over to WMP and retained with other material. Then, on 24 April, all the documents and exhibits SYP had collated were also passed to WMP.
     
  4. The IOPC has not found evidence to indicate there was anything inappropriate or unprofessional in this transfer of responsibility and evidence.
     
  5. Alongside the activity in Sheffield, back in Birmingham, WMP had begun to plan its approach to gathering information. A team of senior officers worked together to identify lines of enquiry and consider staffing requirements. They produced a chart summarising these, which was included in ACC Jones’s policy book and is shown as figure 14A.

 

WMP’s initial investigation plan

Figure 14A: WMP’s initial investigation plan (Source: ACC Jones’s policy books)

  1. None of the topics included stands out as unusual or inappropriate in the context of investigating the disaster.
     
  2. To gather information consistently from large numbers of witnesses, WMP chose to use questionnaires. These were a standard investigative tool, but the questionnaires in this case were mentioned in numerous complaints to the IOPC about WMP’s work.