South Yorkshire Police

All police forces have a bad reputation in the United Kingdom.  Sometimes this is  justified and sometimes it is not.  With South Yorkshire Police, historically, they are all justified.  They are responsible for the Hillsborough disaster, Rotherham Sex Abuse Scandal,  and Battle of Orgreave.  This is singling out one police force as there other bad apples and there have been other bad apples; the thing is these historical abuses are coming more to the front.  Hillsborough has been in the newspapers due to the negligence being found.  

So what can the FoI tell us about them?  Can it show us some light on them?  I asked the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) about their most complained about forces in 201/15.  At time of writing they have not got back to me. The cool this is the IPCC have a section where you can search out about each individual force on how many complaint have been received from them. This is going to be interesting.

SO what else is lurking on the IPCC?  Do they have any more information? Maybe some FoI will help us. Maybe if I asked the IPCC about the Hillsborough files?  Turns out they had it available all the time.  So I checked their website and interesting thing is that the IPCC has a whole section dedicated to Hillsborough AND when we search Orgreave, their site, they have a MASSIVE amount of information.  At least they have been transparent. So what about the other issues?  Things that could not be reported on.

If you type into www.whatdotheyknow.com Hillsbrough Disaster you get the results listed here. A whole smorgasbord of requests.  This one took my interest, the “Absence of pocketbook”... A pocket book is something that Police officer use to record things as they happen. So what was the response?  They couldn't answer the question as it was over the allotted period of time of a FoI request. The thing was they South Yorkshire referred them to  the Hillsborough Independent Panel.  Section 16 strikes again!

So what about the other things. WHat about the Battle of Orgreave?  WHat has been said on that one? Well here is list of arrests made by South Yorkshire, Here is a list of officers and some website which you can gather more information, and here is a response on surveillance on the families.  

The thing is, however, there is a lot of information here but it doesn't take us deeper at this moment. Or does it?  IS there a something else in the background of these case?  Is there something else we can ask?  That is another blog for another day.