The catastrophe was followed by a second scandal: South Yorkshire Police promoted false accounts portraying Liverpool supporters as drunken, ticketless, or violent hooligans responsible for the crush. That narrative took hold in sections of the press and persisted for years, despite the 1990 Taylor Report finding that the primary cause was a failure of crowd control by the police. The first inquests, completed in 1991, returned accidental-death verdicts, which families argued ignored both the operational failures and the evidence that supporters had tried to save one another. The Hillsborough Family Support Group pursued private prosecutions against David Duckenfield and his deputy Bernard Murray, but those efforts failed in 2000, and a 1997 review by Lord Justice Stuart-Smith had found no sufficient basis for a new inquiry. A Hillsborough Independent Panel established in 2009 finally exposed the scale of the institutional failure, including police efforts to shift blame onto fans and serious errors in the original inquests. Its 2012 report led to the accidental-death findings being quashed and to fresh inquests, which ran from 2014 to 2016 and concluded that the supporters had been unlawfully killed through grossly negligent failures by police and ambulance services. The inquests also found that the stadium design contributed to the crush and that Liverpool fans were not responsible. Public outrage after the verdict led to the suspension of South Yorkshire Police chief constable David Crompton, while later criminal investigations produced charges in 2017 for alleged gross-negligence manslaughter, misconduct in public office, and perverting the course of justice, although charges against one defendant were subsequently dropped.
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