There are dozens of factors that contributed to this incident, and not one of them are made by the Police. Different age, different culture.
Forgetting to tell the crowd where to go compounds the police culpability. This would makes the police actions pure negligance.
Once the crowds started pushing, there was no way to stop them. Basic crowd dynamics come into play. If the police had started forcing people who were there already, and paid, then a riot would have sparked. Although part of me agrees that they should have been forced to leave, I recognise that the crowds were volitile. They would have needed an army to turn back the crowds.
The solution? Proper crowd control before the matches started, better control of foot traffic patterns so people where filtered into various feeder corridors would have gone a long way to prevent the disaster. Well that plus never putting up the fencing to begin with.
They opened the WRONG gate, they did it to keep traffic flowing on the road outside the stadium because fans were being forced into the roadway...
There was NO police direction once inside the gate, the police delayed ambulance access to the pitch
The Police then mounted an enormous cover up, removing CCTV records and feeding disgraceful stories to the press
thatcher hated football and used the police as her private bully boys after beating up the miners
After reviewing the disaster I think that the Police were to blame but the cause to the disaster is not what was officially documented.One thing that is often missed out is the large crush that occurred at the turnstiles-something had to be done so they opened the gates and in the seed of the moment forgot to tell the fans not to head down the tunnel but the crowd was so large deaths would have probably occurred if everyone had gone down the less crowded tunnels.The most logical course of action was for police at the back of the crowd to force the back of the crowd to leave to reduce the stadium numbers to a reasonable capacity.It seems to me that the Police put the thought of losing money due to people not getting into the match with tickets ahead of the safety of those in the front of the stadium.I would also like to add that I think the Hillsbrough situation simply had to happen because the way of managing crowds in football stadiums was idiotic because basically they just let everyone in who wanted to watch it and didn't have a single thought about capacity-I think the basic ideas from authorities were wrong at the time and police officers involved on the day have been harshly criticised for following the guidelines by the authorities.I think if the gate wasn't opened people would have died, if the gate was opened but not the tunnel people would have died but if the Police had just took away about half the crowd then no one would have had to die.
