I was in Sheffield the day of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. Not at the Sheffield Wednesday ground, but just over a mile south at the university, at a conference for youth and student groups. Of course no one had a mobile phone, so news filtered in slowly with whispers and exits at the back - people peeling off to find a payphone, until the horrific scale of what had happened finally becoming clear, at which point a note was passed to the chair.
An announcement was made, and the room pretty much emptied. A lot of the delegates knew someone who was, or might, have been there, and a few packed and left after their calls. Across town, I now know, a set of terrible misjudgements were being made regarding when medical assistance should cease for 41 people who would otherwise have probably lived.
Shock at the scale, audacity and sheer bad taste of the cover-up that followed is hard to put in to words. To compound the damage, the cover-up was such that it was difficult to draw accurate lessons from tragic events.
Let’s fast forward to 2005 and the London bombings. A very different type of event, though there was chaos of course. Mobile phone networks were periodically down – and two of my colleagues were on bombed trains (thankfully unhurt).
But in general getting information about people and events was easier. And at the coroner’s inquests in 2011, victims, friends and relatives experienced what decidedly did not happen after the Hillsborough disaster – a painful but honest account of events, including an account of emergency services shortcomings.
These were very different events, but it feels as though something more has changed - what? Some people’s instincts to cover up their own mistakes has not. More recently, initial statements made by the police following controversial incidents at demonstrations were corrected when their accounts were challenged by ‘amateur footage’.
Depressing as it might sound, it does feel as though improvements in technology, not morality, is one of the key changes since 1989. With Hillsborough, there were official film crews who were positioned to follow the football game rather than the unfolding disaster. Come both 7/7 and the policing of modern demonstrations, we have mobile phone footage as crucial evidence.
The footage taken on phones is not the only change. With Hillsborough, to alter the accounts given by policemen and women who were critical of colleagues’ accounts, lines were drawn through typed documents, leaving the sort of limited trail that could be concealed for, in this case, a couple of decades.
Now, merely opening a document on a computer to amend or delete records creates hundreds-to-thousands of pieces of ‘meta-data’. Such trails – and the incidental creation of duplicates – are the stuff of nightmares for anyone attempting to erase or eradicate material. Everyone involved in traumatic events such as these deserves a process as good as the 7/7 inquests run by Lady Justice Hallet, and attendant honesty in related public inquiries.
Could they ever again be frustrated by a cover-up like that which followed the Hillsborough disaster? When such an event occurs, those at fault will hope it is still possible to perpetrate such an injustice.
But in an age where we all record - and then leak - data, information and images from the pores of every electronic device we use, a cover-up on the scale of Hillsborough should be well-nigh impossible, even where official and individual ethics have failed to keep pace with technology.
Eduardo Reyes is Gazette features editor
Follow Eduardo on Twitter
