![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/f29a2a59-2bf8-4800-af51-7941d650f617.jpg.webp.webp\")
Judith MoritzSpecial correspondent<\/p>\n
Investigation analysed stacks of police notebooks and VHS cassettespublished at 12:21 GMT<\/p>\n
12:21 GMT<\/p>\n
Judith Moritz
Special correspondent<\/p>\n
When this investigation into the Hillsborough disaster was launched in 2012, hundreds of staff were recruited to take part.<\/p>\n
A huge office block in Warrington was leased to house them, plus a temperature-controlled archive store, and state-of-the-art technical facilities.<\/p>\n
The stakes were high. \u201cWe have to succeed\u201d, the investigation\u2019s first director Deborah Glass told me. She was aware that part of her team\u2019s remit was to put right the wrongs of the past.<\/p>\n
In 2016 I was invited to watch the investigation team at work.<\/p>\n
Stacked on shelves in the archive store, I saw piles of notebooks. They were the original pocket books belonging to the rank and file police officers who\u2019d been at the Sheffield disaster.<\/p>\n
I assumed they had been carefully preserved by South Yorkshire Police. In fact, I was told, they had spent 25 years in a lock-up, and some had to be cleaned of rat droppings before they were suitable for analysis by the new investigation team.<\/p>\n
The investigators had another hurdle to clear too. They had acquired boxes of VHS cassettes and floppy disks which contained more documentary evidence. But they were useless until the team managed to bring some 1980s tape machines and computers back to life, to render them watchable again. <\/p>\n
In another room, modern technology was on show. Facial recognition analysis was used to track the movements of each of the Liverpool fans in the crush, to find out more about their experience on the day.<\/p>\n
This is the largest ever investigation conducted by the police watchdog.<\/p>\n
At its height 200 staff were on the books. It provided evidence for the two-year-long Inquests which ran in Warrington between 2014 and 2016, and generated evidence for two sets of criminal proceedings. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Investigation analysed stacks of police notebooks and VHS cassettespublished at 12:21 GMT 12:21 GMT Judith MoritzSpecial correspondent When…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294911,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-294910","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}