On 15 April 1989, ninety-six Liverpool fans perished at Hillsborough, the home of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club, in Britain's worst sporting disaster. Most of them were crushed to death as they were herded into a pen like cattle at the Leppings Lane end of the ground. The police not only lacked direction, but they completely lost control and eventually proved helpless to avert the catastrophe.
Most of the basic facts of the case are well known, especially in light of the recent court judgment. Daniel Gordon's documentary tells the story of the disaster itself, plus the twenty-seven year campaign waged by the victims' families to clear the football fans of any wrongdoing on that fateful day.
The stories of what happened are heart-breaking: of families saying goodbye to their loved ones on what was supposed to be a joyous occasion, and never seeing them alive again. The police were brutally insensitive in the way they dealt with the bereaved - having laid out the corpses in a gymnasium next to Hillsborough, they forced the families to identify the dead, and subsequently interviewed them, asking leading questions such as - "was your son/daughter/father drunk when they arrived at the ground?" Yet the overriding impression of HILLSBOROUGH was one of sheer horror at the way the Establishment - the police, the judiciary system, as well as successive governments - closed ranks to deny the victims' families justice for so many years after the disaster occurred. The South Yorkshire Police force, led by David Duckenfield, were entirely to blame for their appalling crowd management on that fateful day; yet they sought to shift blame on to the fans by claiming that the fans were both drunk and violent in their behavior. Statements given by individual officers were deliberately tampered with, and sometimes completely rewritten; while senior officers and high-ranking legal eagles repeatedly claimed that there was no new evidence to show that the police were culpable in any way.
Due to the efforts of Professor Phil Scraton and his fellow panelists (appointed in 2010 to re-examine the case), all these claims turned out to be false. The incriminating evidence was brought to light; and finally, in April 2016, the fans were exonerated.
Yet we were left wondering whether the South Yorkshire Police and other Establishment organizations be punished for their willful attempts to pervert the course of justice. In light of the Establishment's behavior over the last twenty-seven years, it seems that no one still wants to take responsibility for the suffering caused to the victims' families.