POLICE officers stood for a minute’s silence yesterday to remember the 96 football fans who died at Hillsborough in a symbolic display of reckoning with the police’s role in the tragedy.

Police Federation chairman Steve White led 1,200 members in the unprecedented tribute at the union’s annual conference in Bournemouth.

It comes just weeks after the Hillsborough inquiry found failures by the police and ambulance service “caused or contributed” to the disaster and that victims had been unlawfully killed.

Mr White said his “thoughts and deepest sympathies” were with the families of the victims of a “a tragedy that should never — and will never — be forgotten.”

He insisted the errors should not be blamed on new officers, saying: “We must draw a distinction between the actions of a minority of senior officers decades ago and the behaviours of the majority of our members today.”

Addressing the conference later, Andy Burnham said he accepted that the “police force of today is not the police force of the 1980s and 1990s.”

But he told the officers: “It’s too easy to say draw a line under it because it’s all in the past. It’s not.

“Old habits persist — as I saw for myself to some disbelief at the recent inquest. The cover-up continued right up until a few weeks ago — and because of it, so did the pain of the families. I don’t think anyone should minimise that.

“Hillsborough must mark a watershed moment for our policing and criminal justice system.”