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- [00:00]
Podcast Host/Announcer
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:02]
Chuck Bryant
Guaranteed Human. I turned off news altogether.
- [00:08]
Josh Clark
I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything. It's the rage bait.
- [00:15]
Redfin Advertiser
It feels like it's trying to divide people.
- [00:19]
Chuck Bryant
We got clear facts.
- [00:20]
Josh Clark
Maybe we could calm down a little.
- [00:25]
NBC News Announcer
NBC News brings you clear reporting.
- [00:27]
Chuck Bryant
Let's meet at the Facts.
- [00:29]
NBC News Announcer
Let's move forward from there.
- [00:31]
Chuck Bryant
NBC News, reporting for America.
- [00:34]
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- [01:07]
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- [01:39]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartradio.
- [01:49]
Josh Clark
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And it's just us, and that's okay. And this is our ongoing showing studies abroad.
- [02:02]
Chuck Bryant
That's right. And we, you know, this is about the Hillsborough disaster, which was the very unfortunate and super sad and somewhat infuriating deadly crush that happened at an English football stadium in 1989. So we enlisted Kyle, our 1 writer from the UK, to put this together for us. And he did a great job and used all the appropriate letters and terminology and his spelling and stuff, you know.
- [02:31]
Josh Clark
Yeah, I was gonna say no Z's throughout. They were all S's. Yeah, yeah. He did a wonderful job with this, summarizing, like a really big giant story that had we done this episode like when we first started, it would have been totally different because around 2015.
- [02:52]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, yeah.
- [02:52]
Josh Clark
The. The public opinion, the entire basically worldview of what happened at this tragedy completely flip flopped and the truth finally came out. We'll get to all that, but let's. I'd say we kind of give everybody some Background about what's going on here. The whole thing took place, like you said, in 1989 at Hillsborough Stadium. That's in Sheffield, which is in South Yorkshire, which is a county in Yorkshire. And normally this is the home of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club. That's where they play at Hillsborough. But this day it was actually hosting an FA cup semifinal. That means it was all England teams and it was between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. So far, so good. This is just a normal cup semifinal game. It's a big deal. Way bigger than the average Sheffield Wednesday football club game. But, you know, so far it's pretty normal.
- [03:45]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, for sure. They had. Liverpool had more fans, and I'm not sure how it is now, but in 1989, at least that was the case. I think it probably still is. But they were allocated the smaller end of the stadium and the entrance. And you know, as you'll a lot of times with disasters like these, you're gonna see like a series of steps that happen to kind of ensure unwittingly that something terrible goes down. And this was sort of the first one was they allocated the larger fan base, the smaller end of the stadium. And the entrance to that was at the end of Leppings Lane, which was a street that dead ended into the stadium. And not only did it dead end, but it bottlenecked. It got more narrow as you got toward that dead end. So. And that the turnstiles there, which is where you get in at that part of the stadium. There were seven of them. They were old. You know, this is an older stadium. And they didn't, you know, they just couldn't move people through as quickly as like you would be able to today.
- [04:51]
Josh Clark
Exactly. And, you know, under a normal game for Sheffield Wednesday, this is not that big of a problem. This was a very big problem this day because there were 10,100 fans who were just the ones who had standing room only tickets.
- [05:07]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah.
- [05:07]
Josh Clark
In what are called pens. Right. So they're ultimately like basically little terraces with a bunch of little tiny steps on them and some railings which are called crush barriers. And you just stand in them. You just pack everybody in. But they're supposed to say, like, okay, there, no more than this many people can go into this pen. No more than this many people can go into that pen. Whatever. So there's 10,000 people who are all going into these pens. They have to use these seven turnstiles. And so very quickly, even outside of the stadium, a bit of a crush starts to happen, in part because the cops aren't doing anything about having people form a line or cue. They're not directing anybody to do anything. It's just get in where you fit in and whoever gets there first is the one who gets through that turnstile that moment.
- [05:57]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, but you know, there's plenty of surveillance footage and stuff out and it was not, you know, as we'll see, the story that was kind of cooked up to evade, I guess being responsible for this, which is what they were, was that, you know, it was an unruly crowd of drunks. Hooliganism was a thing much more back then. They've basically eradicated that now for the most part. And if you look at the footage it's, you know, it's a bunch of kids, a lot of teenagers. It wasn't super expensive back then to get into soccer and football games like this. It was £6 to get in for standing room only. And they were lively, they were having a good time but it didn't look like anything threatening at that point at all. They were people just like, you know, kind of trying to get into the stadium to see a game they were excited about.
- [06:48]
Josh Clark
Yeah, and all of this really kind of starts about 10 minutes before kickoff. That's when people are like, come on, let's go, we gotta get in. And like by this time that's crowd had back like the lines or whatever had backed up into Leppings Lane pretty far. So people wanted to hurry up and get through. Right. But like you said, everybody was generally good natured. Kickoff was set at 3pm and at 10 till 3pm there were still 5000 Liverpool fans who were outside on Leppings Lane trying to get through these seven turnstiles. And so at this point the cops, at least one cop, the guy who was in charge of managing this side of the outside of the stadium got in touch with the guy who was running all of the police for this soccer match. His name was David Duckenfield. And the guy outside said, hey, we need to open a gate and forget the turnstiles and tickets. There's a bunch of people who are about to get crushed out here and we need to relieve some of this pressure. Please open this gate. And he did that once. Duckenfield ignored it, did it twice. Duck and Field ignored it the third time. It was almost frantic. And Duckenfield finally said, okay, go ahead and open gate C. They did that at 2:52pm and all of a sudden just an enormous mass of people stream into essentially the foyer of the stadium. So now you go from a Crowd crush outside of the stadium to a potential crowd crush just inside the stadium.
- [08:14]
CarMax Advertiser
Yeah.
- [08:14]
Chuck Bryant
And so. And we'll get to more about David Duckenfield, the match commander, and his qualifications and stuff, I guess, in a minute. But one thing we did not mention is these pins, and this was partially to kind of keep hooliganism down. They were fenced within the seating area. So once you got to this large standing area, there were different numbered pins within that that were fenced off from each other. So they were literal pins. And when people started flowing through, when they opened gate C, they were all passing through toward this, the central part of the field, down this long tunnel. I think Kyle said it was 23 meters long to get to pins three and four, which were basically midfield. And there was plenty of room on the pins on the outside. But because nobody was directing traffic, nobody was relaying information, no one knew this. And those central pens were already full at Tintil when that big crowd of people started to make their way to that spot.
- [09:19]
Josh Clark
Right. So again, because it was standing room only, it didn't tell you what pen you had to go to. You could go to whatever pen, but since that tunnel was straight ahead, that's where people naturally went. And like you said, those pens were already full. So as this tunnel, this crush of people, this crowd of people after opening gate C floods in, connects with the people who are already coming through those seven turnstiles, almost all of them start to go through this tunnel. And that tunnel opens up on two pens that are already full of people way over capacity already, as they found in retrospect, there was about 1,000 more people that they allowed onto each pen than they should have based on the kind of crowd control safety stuff they had in place. So it was already dangerously full before those people from gate C even made their way down the tunnel. But when they did, they encountered this mass of other people. But there were people behind them who didn't know this, at the back of the tunnel, in the tunnel, and they all wanted in, too. So everybody was pressing forward. And then all of a sudden, a crowd crush happened in those two middle pens.
- [10:24]
Chuck Bryant
That's right. So it's about five till kickoff at this point, when people later described just sort of a change in how things were going. Like I said, it was people generally happy to go see this soccer game. And by 2:55, it becomes clear that something's wrong. Four minutes later, a lethal crush had developed in those two central pins. And officers, some of them are telling people to move back like this is part of the problem is the officers themselves are very disorganized and not sharing information. So some officers are telling people to move back. They're saying they can't move back because there's people behind them. And those fences that were installed to, I think that was in 1977 to prevent the hooliganism, were keeping people like, once they got in from being like, oh, wow, it's getting super crowded. Let's move to these outer pens where there's plenty of room.
- [11:20]
Josh Clark
Right.
- [11:20]
Chuck Bryant
People started climbing fences and stuff. And this is where it gets really, really out of hand. Like, the panic starts to set in. People are trying to drag people over the fences to safety. Some of the gates of the pens were opened by the cops at that point, but it's developed into a real dangerous mess.
- [11:39]
Josh Clark
Right. And so inside the pens there's those railings that they're kind of like intermittently staggered in the pens, right? So if you walk into one of these pens and you're facing the field, you'll eventually come to a railing. And that's a crowd barrier or crush barrier, which means that if a crush develops it, that barrier is supposed to stop it from going any further than the barrier. So the people behind the barrier, life's going to suck for them. But the people in front of that barrier will be safe. Right? It's like limiting crowd crushes. Well, the problem is, is one of them was very, very old, at least one, and it gave. So there's a whole crush of people who are pressed up against this and a whole bunch of people on the other side of it, too. And now one of those barriers fall and that crush of people just basically spills into this other group of people in the same pen. And people. It just fell over. It was like a wave of people that overcame the people who were standing on the other side of that. That barrier that broke.
- [12:35]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. So all this time, the match starts on time. Word is not again. Communication was just kind of chaotic and no one got word down to the pitch that, hey, maybe we should delay this game and get this under control. And at 3:00pm, the game starts at 3:05. Those barriers, at least the one in pin three had given away. And a human cascade starts. And this is when the devastating stuff. We're not gonna read a thousand accounts of people getting squeezed to death because it's pretty awful. But you know what happens in a situation like that is you can't breathe because you're so packed into one another that you can't expand your chest out to get a breath and you generally die of asphyxiation or like your heart stops, right?
- [13:32]
Josh Clark
Yeah. And this happened to a lot of people in this. We talked a lot about this phenomenon in the crowd episode and I think in the Black Friday episode too. Yeah.
- [13:42]
Chuck Bryant
The crowd one was what inspired this episode.
- [13:44]
Josh Clark
Yeah. Cause we talked just. We just touched on it just a little bit. Right.
- [13:48]
Chuck Bryant
I don't even know if. I mean, I think if we mentioned it, I said, I brought it up because I had asked Kyle to write this.
- [13:54]
Josh Clark
Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. But when there was like, when this crowd, this human cascade happened, people got pushed over and you know, there's a natural human reaction to try to get upright again, which means that you were standing on people beneath you. And so people got trampled. In addition to the people who were pressed up against the other crush barriers or against the fence, there's some really disturbing photos that were taken very close up of the people pressed up against the fence. Did you see those?
- [14:24]
Chuck Bryant
I saw them when I was in high school in Sports Illustrated. Like, I remember this vividly. I didn't go back and revisit a lot of that because it's super upsetting.
- [14:32]
Josh Clark
Yeah, it really is upsetting. And there's a guy who took a lot of these. His name was David Cannon. And he was at least partially responsible for getting the police to finally stop the game. The reason why they wanted to stop the game so bad is because they think that crush or that movement that caused the human cascade was in response to one of Liverpool's players just missing a goal. And so they're like, we need to stop the game. Right. So this guy, David Cannon got them to stop the game, or at least he tried. He's one of the main photographers who was there at the time. So his pictures are, like you said, they're very. It's very disturbing to see this because you can hear people describe it, you can read descriptions of it, but when you see the people pressed up against the fence like they were, it really comes home how horrific this was. Like, you can kind of finally start to imagine yourself in that position.
- [15:27]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's pretty bad. That's why I didn't go back and look at 3:06. It was the superintendent who actually got the game stopped. He went down to the pitch and actually went to the referee. They had a couple of minutes before signaled to the police control box to stop. But it kept on for two more minutes. So that's when the superintendent finally like literally Went on the field and told the referee like you gotta stop this game. This isn't. Cause you know, everyone thought it was just like rowdy fans. And he was like, no, this is not what's happening. The match commander Duckenfield requested more cops to come. It was called operation Support and no one was explaining why or what's going on though. So once the officers and you know, communications are not what they are now, certainly it's not an excuse, but they were not getting briefed on exactly what was going on. So a lot of the cops there assumed that the fans were just rowdy and were trying to like storm the fence to storm the field. And they formed a cordon on the pitch to kind of keep that from happening. And again some of them are opening gates like they see what's going on and some are trying to help the fans, but other cops are either ignoring them or like shoving people back in.
- [16:43]
Josh Clark
Right. Or standing there facing this crowd crush in a line accordant with other cops. So imagine that like just how surreal that would look because they didn't understand what was going on. So eventually they, they managed to open some gates which allowed the, the crowd crush to ease up. And so the crowd crush was bad enough. The, like, the after effects, like immediate after effects were, it just continued to, to go badly. The police response, the, the emergency response was just so uncoordinated that it surely I think they proved it cost the lives of scores of people. I think in the end 95 people died, 700 were injured, two more people died years later. So really 97 people died from this crowd crush.
- [17:36]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, 37 people were teenagers, 27 were parents. There was one 10 year old that died. He was very ironically I guess and sadly the cousin of Steven Gerard who became a big star for England and their soccer team. But I think the oldest, I think that was the youngest at 10 and the oldest was a 67 year old whose brother was playing for Liverpool. And it's, yeah, again, you know, to read through like each account is a little too depressing for this show. But you did mention the two that died years later. I think Tony Bland died four years after in 1993. He had brain damage up into that point and then what they count as. The 97th victim didn't pass away until 2021. But they said it was due to, you know, these life changing injuries that he suffered from this.
- [18:29]
Josh Clark
Yeah, I think also brain damage as well. Andrew Devine. So there was like an immediate response to this. Right. Despite what we'll see Liverpool just taking all of the blame for this. Liverpool fans. There was like a, a public response. One of the things was Paul McCartney jumped in because this is a Liverpool team and he's from Liverpool. I don't know if you knew there or not, Chuck, but he, he, he I guess released a charity single cover of Fairy Cross the Mercy. Have you heard that song? It's a good song.
- [19:06]
Chuck Bryant
I didn't think it was that great, but I think it was a great act.
- [19:09]
Josh Clark
Did you listen to the. I didn't listen to the 89 one that they released for as a charity single. Did you listen to the original? Because that's very good.
- [19:17]
Chuck Bryant
Oh, no, I listened to the one that pertained to the show.
- [19:20]
Josh Clark
Okay, well, at any rate, it's a good song originally and it was like you said, a very cool act. There were also tons. Like, you can also see photos of just the, the whole entire soccer pitch covered with flowers just as an immemorium. It was just. There was a bit. There was a good public response, but ultimately public opinion was much more venomous.
- [19:46]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, I guess that's probably a good time for a break. And we'll come back and talk about that venom right after this.
- [20:01]
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- [22:44]
Chuck Bryant
All right, so right after this the police basically immediately started trying to engage and successfully, as we'll see for a while, engaged in a cover up. They wanted to, you know, not be on the hook for this. And the hooliganism that I talked about had been blamed. I thought we had done an episode on hooliganism, but I don't think we ever did, did we?
- [23:07]
Josh Clark
No. Surely we talked about it in our soccer episode, but I don't think we ever did one. Just on that.
- [23:11]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, it was on the list for a while, but maybe we should wait in case things change again. Okay. But that was the narrative that fed the public basically that match commander and I guess we should go ahead and talk about David Duckenfield a little bit. He's the one that first started saying that gate was forced open by Liverpool fans. Like he denied even opening that gate. This guy was not qualified for this job. I think previous commanders had did things like go down before the game, like hours before, check things out, walk around, identify choke points or potential hazards because this had happened a couple of times before. One time in this very stadium, I think in 1981 and so it was top of mind or should have been and he did not do that. He never actually inspected the grounds beforehand. And he kind of went missing from about noon to 2 o' clock on the day and never accounted for his whereabouts.
- [24:12]
Josh Clark
Yeah, he had never commanded a match at the stadium, let alone a semifinal match, just even a regular match. He'd never commanded it so he had no idea what he was doing. He was also a very arrogant person so he felt like he, he could just do it naturally, didn't need to familiarize himself. And he had served as a rank and File Patrolman or PC like 10 years before. That was the last time he'd worked a match and he was definitely not in charge of it. So he was very much out of his league. And it took him decades to finally acknowledge that. Instead he helped lead this police cover up that shifted all the blame unfairly and untruthfully toward the fans for Liverpool and off of the cops who are really responsible for the tragedy.
- [25:07]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, for sure. So we'll get to kind of what happened in a timeline sense as this goes on in a minute. But initially the police watchdog recommended that there was like a disciplinary case would be brought against Duckenfield that did not happen at the time and he was medically retired two years later on full pension basically to evade these like discipline from this incident. The case again that the cops built was that people were drunk, they got there late. It was the Liverpool fans. A lot of them didn't even have tickets and they were trying to just force their way in. And over the years they found out that they had gone back in even this is how despicable it gets. Not only did they cook up this narrative but they went back in and cooked the books and altered witness statements and removed comments that were unfavorable to the police and how things were handled and they like torched it basically.
- [26:10]
Josh Clark
Yeah. And the force was very regimented I saw. Right. So there wasn't, there wasn't going to be any dissent. There wasn't going to be any secret tip offs to the press about what really happened by any of the police constables, you know under these guys charge. Right. So the top saying this is what happened. That's what everybody on the police force is going to say what happened. And so that's what the media heard. And the, the British tabloids typically have like a fairly bad reputation and they really showed up for it for this one. The, the, the whole idea that the, the soccer fans especially the Liverpool fans in particular were responsible for this, would they just beat that drum incessantly. They called the fans and by extension the victims beasts. Jobs, which means thugs, vile. And then the sun printed a front page article called the Truth. I think within a day or two after this that really drove this home. Like just how despicable the tabloids could get about this stuff.
- [27:20]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, they said things like there were fans that were urinating on cops, that they were looting the dead at the time. And this was not the case. And the sun ended up apologizing in 2012 and has been boycotted in Liverpool ever since. I still don't think they sell the sun there even after the apologies. But this was, you know, this was the 1980s and things were different back then. The hooliganism was, you know, much more prominent. So it was a narrative which was easy for people to believe in England. And when they were reading it, people were like, yeah, this is the typical sort of antisocial underclass is how Kyle put it there. Trying to get in without tickets, drunk at three in the afternoon. It was a different kind of. It was a different sport back then in a lot of ways as far as, as we'll see the kind of money that poured into the Sport in the 1990s after this. Certainly with the start of their Premier League in 1992 and ticket prices rising and stadiums modernizing and just big money and big business, it was a lot more just kind of small time and old school and quaint back then. And so people were ready to accept this narrative kind of as it was being fed to them.
- [28:45]
Josh Clark
Yeah, Britain has a classist streak running through it and this certainly fit that idea, that supposition that lower classes were drunk and violent. And of course they, they were responsible for this. Right, but so the public accepted this. The, the Thatcher government obviously was totally down with this idea and that's just how it went. Like that was it as far as everybody was concerned. Thanks to the police reports, thanks to the government stance, thanks to what the media was saying. What happened was a bunch of drunk Liverpool fans who didn't have tickets stormed the gate and 97 people ended up dying as a result. Shame on Liverpool and its fans. That was the public opinion on this for years.
- [29:33]
Chuck Bryant
That's right. So in 1990 we get our first independent report. It was called the Taylor Report for Lord Justice Taylor. And they, I mean this was kind of right after. And they did come out blaming the police, failure to control the crowd first off, and duck and field specifically for failing to close this tunnel. Like if they even closed that tunnel and it would have fed people to the empty pens and that could have, that probably would have avoided this whole thing despite like having way too many people down there. If they would have been fed to those emptier pens, this probably wouldn't have happened.
- [30:12]
Josh Clark
Sure.
- [30:13]
Chuck Bryant
And he made safety recommendations in the final report. But very key, it didn't have anything in there about like, hey, these people were all just victims and they had no part in sort of making this happen. That didn't come along until much later.
- [30:30]
Josh Clark
No, for sure that closing that tunnel too, or his failure to close the tunnel too was even worse than it seems because that was actually such a widely used technique for police superintendents who were in charge of overseeing matches over the years that one of them had his name on it. It was called the Freeman tactic and it was as simple as closing that middle tunnel and opening the entrances to the less full pens. And so that just shows you how little of a grasp Duckenfield had on the concept of safety. And at a, at a football match that he was responsible for overseeing, he, he didn't even know about the Freeman tactic if you ask me. And like rank and file cops who worked matches before knew about the Freeman tactic. It was like that was a huge deal in, in addition to all the people dying as a result that the fact that like everyone knew that you should do that and Duck and Field didn't is a big deal.
- [31:26]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, for sure. And a year later, after the Taylor independent report, the Taylor report, these inquests are coming back with verdicts. Accidental death is basically what they all were decided upon. And it was very controversial. Obviously the victims families are, and they're the ones who kept us alive all these years until they finally got some measure of accountability, I guess. The coroner ruled out evidence relating to deaths anything after 3pm he ruled out evidence because he said everybody was either dead or brain dead by 3:15. And there was like actual proof that would come out later that some people survived until 4pm and a lot of people would have survived for that 45 minutes had they gotten emergency services in there in an orderly manner.
- [32:20]
Josh Clark
Right, yeah, those are the people I was talking about earlier. So that coroner essentially was just basically going along with the, the sentiment, the public sentiment that these people, surely it wasn't the police who were responsible. Right? Yeah. In addition though to being disorganized, they were also like really cruel to the families. And this, this stuff came out in these reports, including the HIP report in the trials that like if you were a Victim, family member. You were sent to a gym, a nearby gym that had been turned into a morgue, and the first thing that you encountered was standing out, waiting outside in the cold before they led you in and handed you a stack of Polaroids of the victim's dead bodies. Right.
- [33:06]
NBC News Announcer
Yeah.
- [33:06]
Chuck Bryant
I mean, they had to look through those to identify their own. It was pretty brutal.
- [33:11]
Josh Clark
But it wasn't even like, are you looking for a child? Are you looking for a man? And they were sorted. It was like, here's the stack of Polaroids. Look through them until you find your. Your loved one. The parents of the children who died, they weren't allowed to hold or kiss them because they were told that they were property of the coroner. And the coroner himself seems to have been on the COVID up to some degree, tangentially, because he ordered that all of the deceased, including the children, have their blood drawn to be tested for alcohol content to support this police narrative. Well, what turned out, what he did inadvertently was show that alcohol was not a factor in this, really. Like, there were very few drunk people and the ones that were drunk weren't all that drunk.
- [33:56]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. I mean, in a weird way, it's good that he did that, you know.
- [33:59]
Josh Clark
Yeah. So, like you said, the families of the victims organized and tried to keep this thing alive and, you know, keep the public from solidifying their opinion about what had happened. And they managed to get a private prosecution, I guess, laid or charged against the police for this, for the incident. Didn't know you could do that. Apparently you can still in the uk, America, some other places, but a private group of people can get a court to prosecute people, and that's what they did. And this found that Duck and Field, they couldn't reach a verdict on him, whether he was criminally responsible or not. One of his deputies was acquitted and the judge in this case said, that's it. Duck and Field will never face another. A retrial like this, is it. He's not responsible. Even though we failed to reach a verdict, which is a weird thing to do, but that happened in 2000.
- [34:53]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. Charges against Sheffield, the actual football club that wasn't even playing that day, but he played in that stadium. Sheffield Wednesday, and the Sheffield City Council and the safety engineers, the Eastwoods, were ruled out. And this was, I think, 10 years earlier, so they were already off the hook. So that was all in 2000. Twelve years later, in 2012, there was another report that, the HIP report, the Hillsborough Independent panel, and that brought about some new inquests, more sort of digging into this thing about like what happened with the police. And this is the one that really started to kind of turn the tide as far as the public goes. And one of the reasons it happened was because MP Andy Burnham was at a 20 year memorial service and was just lambasted by the crowd. People chanting justice for the 96 really had a hard time at that event. So he's the one that was like let's open this back up. 450,000 pages of information. And this is when they, they really kind of started to make things right.
- [36:02]
Josh Clark
Yeah. That panel apparently kept like releasing information piecemeal and the, the presses kept reporting on it and very quickly the public was like oh wait, we've been wrong. It wasn't these drunken Liverpool fans. They were mistreated. The families of the victims were mistreated, survivors were mistreated. It was actually these cops and the cops had lied to essentially cover up their responsibility. Like the, the public opinion just completely shifted. And so that hip report led to new inquests and the, the inquests found that the, the 96 victims and later on the 97th victim were all unlawfully killed. So it wasn't accidental anymore. Like the first inquest found they were unlawfully killed which meant someone is criminally accountable for their deaths. Right. And this inquest said go figure it out. Like this is, this is our, we're saying, we're recommending that somebody is responsible for this.
- [37:01]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. It also found that 41, I was looking for the number earlier but 41 of the 96 who died, they said quote, had potential to survive if the rescue had been a little more organized. Because I don't think we said the first ambulance arrived on the scene at 3:16 and even when the ambulances had been called, they didn't know the severity of the situation. Cause they, I think one cop called for like a big, you know, mass of ambulances to come. But it wasn't described what was happening. So they refused that initial. The medical services refused that initial like huge rush of ambulances and just sent like some. They also didn't set up a triage on the field. Like you know, we'll get to that in a little more detail. But 41 of the 96 would have survived, they determined, which is just a brutal number.
- [37:50]
Josh Clark
Yeah. In 2019, after all this stuff had come out, public opinion changed. Duckenfield was dragged back into court. Remember that one judge had been like he can't face a retrial. Well they were like, well circumstances have changed enough now. That he's definitely going to be tried again and he was found not guilty of gross negligence manslaughter. And then they also heard evidence about the altering of the police reports to make it favorable for the cops and make it unfavorable for the Liverpool fans. And those guys got off too. So now we have a place where the inquest, the government inquest is saying these people are unlawfully killed so someone's criminally responsible. And the courts are saying the people who are responsible are not criminally responsible. So nobody is liable anymore. Nobody's responsible officially, yeah.
- [38:46]
Chuck Bryant
And then the final, well, who knows it's the final report because they seem to still be happening. But last year in 2025, an independent office for Police conduct report came out and basically reiterated that nobody was going to be held like actually held responsible. You know, they, it wasn't as cold hearted as it sounds. They were basically saying like, hey, this is 36 years later. All 12 of these officers have either passed on or have long since retired. And I got the sense it was like, can we put this all behind us now and not throw these old cops in jail essentially.
- [39:28]
Josh Clark
But yeah, I think the families were like, well, they're still responsible even though they're old. And the reason that they got old is because you took 14 years to conduct this investigation.
- [39:37]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, for sure.
- [39:38]
Josh Clark
Let's take a break Chuck and we'll come back and finish up, huh?
- [39:42]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, let's do it.
- [39:52]
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- [42:04]
Josh Clark
Okay Chuck, so not just the, the hip report, but a bunch of different reports basically showed quite clearly that the police response and the emergency response was just terrible. And you talked a lot about what the, I guess the cluster with the ambulances. But the police as well were essentially disorganized, about as disorganized as a group of police can be. And the reason why is because again, David Duckenfield was just out of his depth through and through, even though he was commanding the match. And I said that he was a rather arrogant type. And he was. But in 2015, for the first time in decades, 20, 25 plus years, as these reports started coming out and public opinion changed when he was tried, eventually he admitted, after seven days of intense grilling on the stand, he finally basically broke down and admitted like, yes, he was responsible for the death of those 96 people because the 97th hadn't died yet. And that he froze under pressure. This is a complete reversal of what he'd been saying the whole time, Chuck. Like he'd been saying it was the Liverpool fans. They were drunk. They were drunk. These guys have been saying it for decades. Now all of a sudden the guy in charge says, no, I failed and people died because I was not qualified to command that match.
- [43:26]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, you know, you hear something like that as a family member of a victim and it's. I don't, I don't know how that feels actually. I don't know if that would provide some solace. To finally hear the truth or if it just like re angers you all over again after all these years?
- [43:40]
Josh Clark
Probably both.
- [43:42]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. I'm sure there's a lot of mixed emotion about it, but at the very least, that finally happened. I mean, there is something about somebody finally admitting something and not just continuing to gaslight the world and the victims themselves. So I guess that is something. It really changed stadium safety and security after this. The Taylor report, they basically said, hey, no more of these standing room only things. You have to have seats for everybody that's in there. I think it was all the clubs in the top two divisions in 1994 had to move to that. And then they established the ground sports Ground safety authority after that to, you know, to oversee like all of these football stadiums over there.
- [44:28]
Josh Clark
Right, yeah. This was a major turning point, not just in safety at football matches, but in the game of football itself, because this happened to coincide with England making it into the semifinals in the World cup in 1990. And, you know, a lot of people who had been former football fans were now caught up in the spirit again. So that brought a lot of people back to being fans of pro football. Those upgrades that the clubs and the stadiums were required to undertake meant that they needed to up ticket prices. The higher ticket prices, like you said, kind of changed the social strata of fans. It just. It got more expensive, it got more business. Like soccer changed almost directly as a result of the Hillsborough tragedy.
- [45:13]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. And that, you know, when the Premier League came on in 92, like, that was. That was a real game changer. Like the amount of money that is spent in the Premier League on players, on the teams, on. I think there's a. And I'll probably get some of this wrong because I don't follow the Premier League, but my good friends do, all of them almost, and they were talking about the. You know, you get relegated if you don't, I guess when or I guess if you're in the bottom of whatever category and you don't make that, you don't win that game to stay in the Premier League. You get relegated down to the lower league. And so that game to see who gets relegated and who doesn't is called the most expensive game in sports or something like that, just because of like all the money that comes with that you miss out on with being relegated or that comes with staying in the Premier League.
- [46:04]
Josh Clark
Yeah, these guys get paid like thousands and thousands of pounds a year to play. Some of them way more than that. Even.
- [46:13]
Chuck Bryant
The first joke of the episode, let's
- [46:15]
Josh Clark
talk about Keir Starmer because he is under fire right now. That family or that organization of victims, families, they haven't gone away. They organized and they're still very vocal. And one of the things that they have been doing is putting pressure on Keir Starmer and his labor government because he made a direct promise that he would see through the Hillsborough law, which would. It was pretty important legislation or it would be if they get it passed through.
- [46:42]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. I think the whole point, it seems to be, of the Hillsborough law would be to enforce. And it's weird that you have the law to do this, but to enforce truth. When cops are dealing with something like this and basically almost like a whistleblower thing, like, hey, you can come out and tell the truth. You're obliged to tell the truth. You don't have to go along with this narrative that gets passed down. And that loyalty that you were kind of talking about earlier on. I didn't really dig into the law. I don't know if there are protections or anything involved, but that law was. Is. Hasn't been passed yet, which is really frustrating.
- [47:23]
Josh Clark
Right? Yeah. Not just cops too, but like any public official has to tell the truth when it pertains to their work. Which actually it is sad that you would need to make a law, but that would be revolutionary to have a law like that in any country, you know?
- [47:38]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. And I think the hang up may be. Or one of the hangups is MI5, and we did a pretty good episode on that at one point. I think Kyle helped us with that one too. But unless I'm reading this wrong, it seems like MI5 is hanging it up because they're like, hey, listen, we deal in lies and subterfuge. That's our bag, so we can't be included in this.
- [48:01]
Josh Clark
That is our bag, baby.
- [48:03]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, that's right. I missed the baby.
- [48:07]
Josh Clark
You got anything else?
- [48:08]
Chuck Bryant
I got nothing else. Just a. An awful tragedy, like I said. I remember this was right after spring break my senior year. I came home and I had been a regular Sports Illustrated subscriber since I was like 9 years old. And this was, I think, the COVID issue even. And that's where I saw those brutal pictures. If you're into a. It's not like super hard to watch other than, you know, it's about the tragedy, but they don't show, like truly, truly awful things. There's that 12 minute documentary from the Guardian that you sent that really encapsulates it. Although there are some body bags and stuff like that. So I guess there should be a trigger warning there.
- [48:49]
Josh Clark
Yeah, for sure.
- [48:50]
Chuck Bryant
But thankfully there weren't. Like, you know, I didn't see any actual video footage of the fences and the people. Like, I don't know if that exists.
- [49:00]
Josh Clark
Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I don't know either. The photographs definitely do. I'd be surprised if there wasn't any footage though, you know?
- [49:06]
CarMax Advertiser
Yeah.
- [49:06]
Chuck Bryant
I wonder if that photographer won an award for that work. I bet he did.
- [49:11]
Josh Clark
He should have. Especially if he was one of the people helping. Because, you know, so many fans helped, you know, try to render aid to the people on the field. One thing we probably should mention that we didn't is that in 2012, the United Kingdom government, through Prime Minister David Cameron at the time, apologize to the victims families for the double injustice of the loss of life and the blame that was put on Liverpool fans. So at least they had that kernel of something.
- [49:45]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, solace, maybe.
- [49:46]
Josh Clark
Who knows? Solace. Thank you. A quantum of it. If you want to know more, you're
- [49:50]
Chuck Bryant
just throwing around British pop culture references. Who knew that James Bond and Austin Powers were going to make an appearance?
- [49:56]
Josh Clark
I'm going to star in my own sitcom called Suddenly Angle a File, but it's gonna be spelled like I just mangled Anglophile.
- [50:04]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, Or Blackadder. That's another good title.
- [50:06]
Josh Clark
Sure. Since Chuck made a joke about Blackadder as foretold in 2008. It's time for listener mail.
- [50:16]
Chuck Bryant
I'm gonna call this I screwed up on that Van Gogh episode about the movie. Hey, guys, just finished the events of Van Gogh episode. Want to let you know. The movie with Willem Dafoe is called At Eternity's Gate. This is something I remember now, but I forgot at the time. You mustn't have seen it, but we're aware of it. More importantly, you must see Loving Vincent. And I think that's what I said it was called. That's the movie that's animated using 65,000 paintings done in the style of Van Gogh by 100 Polish painters.
- [50:44]
Josh Clark
Wow.
- [50:45]
Chuck Bryant
It's visually amazing and incredibly well done. And the soundtrack includes the song from Don McLean. I think we talked about it in the episode Vincent Starry, Starry Night. Beautifully complements the movie. Highly recommended. My wife and I are huge fans of the show. Have been listening to every episode since almost the beginning. Keep up the amazing work and don't let those naysayers who complain about your sidebars. That's one of the things we enjoy most. And that is from Brian and Alexis in Bethlehem Penns.
- [51:15]
Josh Clark
Nice. Thanks, Brian and Alexis. We appreciate that, Chuck. Since you stepped up and took a correction, I feel like I should admit to one.
- [51:23]
Chuck Bryant
Oh, okay.
- [51:24]
Josh Clark
In our Le Mans. Short stuff.
- [51:28]
Chuck Bryant
You mean Le Mans.
- [51:30]
Josh Clark
That's part of it. The bigger part is that I said Greece is an island. I even went back and double checked and everybody's right. It is not an island at all.
- [51:39]
Chuck Bryant
I didn't catch you saying that.
- [51:41]
Josh Clark
So it's like Germany being landlocked. Now my geography skills are starting to match up with my math skills. Skills.
- [51:47]
Chuck Bryant
I wish I would have caught that because I remember very distinctly that you could take a train there.
- [51:53]
Josh Clark
Well, in the episode you said, yeah, yeah, it sure is an island. I swear to God, it's an island. Josh. That's right.
- [51:58]
Chuck Bryant
I. I doubled down verbatim.
- [52:01]
Josh Clark
All right, well, thanks to Brian and Alexis. And if you want to be like Brian and Alexis, you can get in touch with us too, via email@stuffpodcastheartradio.com
- [52:15]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
- [52:30]
NBC News Announcer
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Chuck Bryant
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