Policing with Contempt: The Degrading of Truth and Denial of Justice in the Aftermath of the Hillsborough Disaster
| Published date | 01 September 1999 |
| Author | Phil Scraton |
| Date | 01 September 1999 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00126 |
The Hillsborough disaster happened at a premier United Kingdom
soccer stadium in April 1989 claiming the lives of ninety-six men, women,
and children. Over the next decade there followed a Home Office inquiry,
a criminal investigation, compensation hearings as far as the House of
Lords, the longest inquests in recent history, a judicial review, a judicial
scrutiny, and private prosecutions. Media coverage has remained intense
and there has been persistent parliamentary debate. Despite the evidence
amassed, much of it undisclosed, the legal argument and official discourse,
the bereaved and survivors remain deeply concerned that the ‘truth’ of
Hillsborough has been suppressed and reconstructed.
This paper considers Hillsborough and its long-term aftermath in the
context of a theoretical discussion of the reconstitution and registration of
‘truth’ within social democracies when state institutions stand accused. It
adopts a critical analysis drawing on human rights discourse in discussing
how ‘regimes of truth’ operate to protect and sustain the interests of the
‘powerful’. In examining the formal legal processes and their outcomes
regarding Hillsborough, the paper demonstrates how they were manip-
ulated to degrade the truth and deny justice to the bereaved. In revealing
the procedural and structural inadequacies of these processes, the paper
raises fundamental questions about the legal and political accountability
of the police. Finally, it discusses alternative forms, informed by a human
rights agenda, through which ‘truth’ can be acknowledged and institution-
alized injustices reconciled.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
* Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice Studies and Director,
Centre for Studies in Crime and Social Justice, Edge Hill University College,
Ormskirk, Lancashire L39 4QP, England
Many thanks to my colleagues at the Centre for Studies in Crime and Social Justice for their
personal and professional support and their academic and political commitment to ‘truth and
justice’. My deepest appreciation to the many bereaved families and survivors whose accounts
are at the heart of the wider study. Their strength, warmth and integrity is remarkable.
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JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 26, NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER 1999
ISSN: 0263–323X, pp. 273–97
Policing with Contempt: The Degrading of Truth and Denial of
Justice in the Aftermath of the Hillsborough Disaster
PHIL SCRATON*
THE PRODUCTION OF TRUTH AND THE EXERCISE OF POWER
Truth is an enigmatic concept. It is simultaneously constrained and liber-
ated by the possibility of the absolute. Its definition, identification, and veri-
fication involve intellectual, political, and legal processes seemingly
straightforward, yet inherently complex. Establishing precisely and contex-
tually ‘what really happened’ at any given moment, in specific circumstances,
is rarely uncomplicated. Perception, interpretation, and representation are
essential characteristics of ‘self’; the world ‘at the level of appearances’.1
They reflect the ‘lived realities’ of agency, of personal placement, in the struc-
tural dynamics of culture, politics, and materialism.2
Underpinning legal processes and the administration of justice in social
democracies is the distillation of broad consensus from individual testi-
monies. The weighing and weighting of personal truths, exploring their expe-
riential grounding and examining selective memories together expose the
myth of absolute truth. Yet, at least in principle, they offer procedures
through which the truth can be aggregated. Ostensibly, criminal and civil
investigations, official and unofficial inquiries, courts and tribunals, are
evidence-bound. They seek truth in people’s stories; stories stripped to the
bare bones of formal statements; memories tested by cross-examination.
The transition from stories to statements, the latter devoid of the under-
lying contexts of perception and interpretation, does not take place in a
vacuum. ‘Advanced’ democratic societies, whatever their claims for the insti-
tutionalisation of equality and liberty, embody and reproduce the structural
inequalities of global capitalism, patriarchy, and neo-colonialism. These
inequalities are not figments of ideological construction, they are woven into
the fabric of the state and civil society; hegemonic rather than ideological.
The casual, almost flippant, dismissal of structural inequality – as if it
belonged to some bygone modernist age – has deflected attention away from
the strength of determining contexts.3Yet class is inextricably linked to the
social relations of production. Unemployment, poverty, and opportunity,
globally and nationally, are expressions of those relations. Whatever the
advances claimed for women, ‘post-feminism’ as a new era of post-patriarchal
opportunity cannot be sustained in theory or in practice.4Neither has there
been significant progress in challenging and resolving the subordination of
different sexualities.5Similarly, the consolidation of 1990s Fortress Europe has
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© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999
1 E.O. Wright, Class, Crisis and the State (1978).
2 A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society (1984).
3P. Scraton and K. Chadwick, ‘The Theoretical and Political Priorities of Critical Criminology’
in The Politics of Crime Control, eds. K. Stenson and D. Cowell (1991).
4 V. Coppock, D. Haydon, and I. Richter, The Illusions of Post-Feminism: New Women, Old
Myths (1995).
5See R. N. Lancaster and M. di Leornardo ‘Gender, Sexuality and Political Economy’ (1996)
6(8) New Politics 21.
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