It’s twenty years since the Hillsborough disaster today.

It’s been crossing people’s minds lately anyway. The Sun reported in the immediate aftermath about fans stealing from the dead and urinating on ambulancemen trying to treat the victims – stories designed to obscure the crowd control failures of the attending police force, and which turned out to be completely and utterly untrue.

We’ve seen something similar happen again in the past couple of weeks with the “hail of bottles” stories put about by the police who treated Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests – it even ended up as a hail of bricks in the print edition of that day’s Evening Standard. Twenty years after Hillsborough, the truth was much quicker to out – there is footage of the incident which reveals one apparently plastic bottle being thrown, by someone who is immediately admonished by the rest of the protesters. (Seen on TV – can anyone point me towards an online clip?)

There’s a wider point here too. One of the common responses I saw to the allegations of police brutality during the recent G20 protests was along the lines of “So what? The police have been treating football fans like this for years!”

Point taken. I really do recommend you read Sara Bedford’s piece about Hillsborough, because I can’t put it any better than she does. Here’s an extract:

For many fans, Hillsborough was an accident waiting to happen. I had witnessed other fans being mistreated or falsely arrested over the years and it didn’t stop with Hillsborough. If anything, the police became emboldened that they had got away with it and treated fans more brutally. Over the years, I was baton charged, thrown against fences and walls, kicked by a police horse, threatened with arrest for pointing out a police officer taking a backhander to allow someone through a roadblock, left in Lime Street station overnight, after being held up with several hundred other Arsenal fans coming back from Anfield and missing the train, and on occasions too numerous to mention, held in a tight area for periods of time ranging from minutes to hours. All of these were for no reason other than being a football supporter.

UPDATE: Also, read Qwghlm.