Greater Manchester Police have finally paid out compensation to fans who were wrongly held by police on their way to the Man United match 18 months ago.
The 80 fans have been paid a total of £184,850 by the GMP for the incident in November 2008 when they were forced to travel back to Stoke from a pub in Irlam before the match took place.
The police were forced to concede last year that they had acted outside of the law and have now admitted that their officers were ‘heavy handed’ towards the group of Potters fans when there had been no trouble at the pub.
That’s not just a good result for those Stokies, but for the thousands of football fans who travel the length and breadth of the country every year without any sort of trouble. GMP weren’t the only force who had tried erroneously imposing Section 27 of the Violent Crime Reduction Act, which allows officers to disperse people who ‘could pose a risk to disorder’, on football fans travelling peacefully to away matches and there seems to have been a marked reduction in such incidents since last year’s court case found in favour of the fans.
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