SYP’s right to deflect the blame away from the force and its officers
While the evidence points to SYP undertaking such a coordinated effort, there is an essential point to recognise: it was legally entitled to do so and to present its ‘best case’ to the Taylor Inquiry. There was no legal duty for the force, or individual officers, to obtain or put forward to the Taylor Inquiry any information which might present a different version of events to their preferred narrative. As long as officers did not put forward evidence that was false, misleading or inaccurate, they were not breaching the professional standards of the time.
In the aftermath of the disaster, SYP was, rightly, under intense scrutiny. Its reputation was under threat, damaging public confidence in the force. It faced the prospect of officers being prosecuted and the force having to pay large sums in compensation to those affected. As a publicly funded body, the force had a right to defend itself and to seek to fairly apportion blame, if it believed other individuals and organisations were to some degree responsible.
This appears particularly applicable to SYP’s persistent argument that officers were not responsible for safety on the terraces, and that this was the role of SWFC stewards, as the Green Guide would indicate.
In such circumstances, a police force is—like any other party—allowed to defend itself against allegations and put forward its best case. However, this did not give SYP total freedom to consistently and intentionally:
present unbalanced and unsubstantiated evidence, placing a disproportionate emphasis on supporter behaviour even where it could not prove certain allegations (for example, that large numbers of supporters attended without tickets and/or arrived late, deliberately)
alter the underlying evidence of officers before it was submitted, by amending accounts to fit the narrative it wished to present
minimise the evidence that was given in relation to previous police actions to close the tunnel and monitor capacity in the pens, and in relation to the extent to which the police had previously managed the arrival of supporters at the Leppings Lane end
While such actions may have been legally permissible in relation to the Taylor Inquiry, where there was no duty of candour, they were very clearly not in keeping with the Inquiry’s aim to gain a full understanding of the disaster and prevent such an incident from happening again.
