In October 2016, a former Merseyside Police officer who was present at Orgreave told BBC journalist Dan Johnson that at a briefing before the confrontation senior SYP officers were "anticipating trouble and in some ways relishing it and looking forward to it". He said that the police support units had been given "a licence to do what we wanted" and were ordered to charge "a largely peaceful crowd". Of the violence that followed, he said: "I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I was just seeing police officers attack people. These were people on the ground and even if they weren't doing anything – just walking away – police officers had their batons and they were just hitting people." A number of police officers had removed the identification numbers on their uniforms, as illustrated in an iconic photograph taken on the day by Martin Jenkinson.