Learn more about Hillsborough
On 15 April, 1989, at Hillsborough, 96 people went to a soccer game, and never returned because of an entirely avoidable human crush disaster.
In the immediate aftermath, hasty theories of the cause of the disaster were floated, based on prevailing perceptions of football supporters as drunken hooligans. Some of these lies were self serving attempts by the
police to fend off blame, and less diligent newspapers busied themselves publishing the most sensational accounts. These theories sought to place the blame on the supporters themselves, thus minimizing their negligence for allowing subpar infrastructure as well as inept crowd safety planning, emergency services, and police response when the disaster began to unfold. In reality supporters performed some of the functions that the police and emergency services should have, helping people escape the crush, and ferrying the injured and dead on improvised stretchers.
These theories were roundly dismissed in the official government inquest into the tragedy, known as the Taylor report. It's recommendations saw wholesale changes in safety provisions across British soccer. Nevertheless, the damage of some of these lies, and the closure of any legal avenues for justice against deadly negligence at such a raw time piled collective injustice atop collective trauma.
Over the last 20 years this collective trauma has brought collective action. While justice has still not been done, and many wounds are still open, much progress has been made in rectifying the damage done by the lies spread.
This is why after all the progress made, and within days of the 20th Hillsborough memorial, it was sickening to hear Mr. Cohen once again use these lazy stereotypes rather than researched facts to recapitulate and propagate the same lies here in the United States, a country far less aware of the facts of the tragedy. Doing so repeatedly was intentionally offensive.
My brief account by no means provides the neccesary detail of what happened, what went wrong, and lacks the true emotional impact of reading first hand accounts. I do not propose to try and better the accounts offered below. Be aware that this content is often disturbing.
Detailed Shockwave account, and first hand accounts, from the Hillsborough Justice Campaign
