| Description | In the immediate aftermath of the Disaster Chief Superintendent Wain requested South Yorkshire Police officers principally involved on the day of the disaster write their personal accounts of the day. Officers were instructed to write them on plain paper, therefore were not official CJA statements (see POL/6/2 for these).
The officers were advised to include information including: Time came on duty; Who they were responsible to; Where they were deployed and whether they deviated from that position; What they saw that was relevant to the incident?; What they did. They were also asked to include name, rank, number and sign at the end. It was to be as accurate an account as they could make.
Under legal advice from South Yorkshire Police's solicitors, Hammond Suddards, over 400 of these Officer's Reports were then made into official witness statements and submitted to the Taylor Inquiry and West Midlands Police.
Hammond Suddards, however, suggested those reports that contained information that was deemed to be hearsay, opinion or expressing emotion were marked for amendment and the officer was asked to remove these passages before it was accepted as a statement.
This series of records contains a list of those chosen for amendment (POL/10/7/1), the annotated versions (POL/10/7/2) and the original Officer's Reports (POL/10/7/3).
POL/10/7/2 contains those which have been annotated with the changes requested and retyped with these changes made. These reports are referenced with Incident I05, Coroner's Inquests.
POL/10/7/3 consists of typed, hand written reports and Typing Service Document prints from HOLMES. These have been annotated by the Statement Reader in the Major Incident Room for the purposes of indexing key information into the system and raising further actions.
POL/10/7/4 contain audit Indexes to these reports, POL/10/7/5 are further photocopies of the original Reports (POL/10/7/3)
POL/10/7/6/1 are Reports requested by Hillsborough Family Support Group. These are reports which the Hillsborough Families Support Group requested copies of between 19 October 1999 and 28 October 1999. The majority of these reports are from Merseyside officers and officers from other forces outside South Yorkshire, but also include West Midlands Police and South Yorkshire Police internal memoranda about particular lines of inquiry, which are not officer's reports in the usual sense, but which do have R numbers. POL/10/7/6/2 are Indexed copies from HOLMES. |