Bewilderment

After celebrating the verdicts in April from the second inquest into the Hillsborough disaster I've been building on my very basic knowledge of what took place, taking advantage of some of the excellent and informative material available on the Internet. The BBC's recent documentary, in collaboration with ESPN, is a particularly good example of material that manages to be both informative and deeply moving at the same time. It should be compulsory viewing for all who believe that those in authority are somehow automatically worthy of trust.

One thing I've found viewing this and other worthy sources is that whilst the negligence of the police and other authorities is abundantly, painfully clear there remains a mystery, for me at least, as to how exactly they could get it all so absolutely wrong. When the disaster took place I assumed the problems of crowd control must have been pretty complex. But the terrible thing is that they weren't. Understanding what went wrong at the Leppings Lane end is very simple; the mistakes made were simple ones. It's actually difficult to grasp how someone sitting in the central control box could have screwed up so spectacularly.

And it seems oddly important to understand not just the dreadful fact of the criminal negligence but what lay behind it.