England Starts Fingerprinting Drinkers

dptalia writes "In an effort to reduce alcohol related violence, England is rolling out mandatory fingerprinting of all pub patrons. If a pub owner refuses to comply with the new system, and fails to show 'considerable' reductions in alcohol-related crimes, they will lose their license. Supposedly the town that piloted this program had a 48% reduction in alcohol-related crime." From the article: "Offenders can be banned from one pub or all of them for a specified time - usually a period of months - by a committee of landlords and police called Pub Watch. Their offenses are recorded against their names in the fingerprint system. Bradburn noted the system had a 'psychological effect' on offenders."

Comments

Re:Skirting the system?

[joto]

As someone who works in security, and knows that it's always the same people who end up in a fight (or whatever), I support this wholeheartedly. When I go out to get a drink, I want to go out without some idiot harassing me, when he's done the same to at least 30 other people this month. I believe most pub-goers feel likewise. But this is slashdot, here everybody is concerned about privacy, the majority probably so concerned that they'd rather stay home than to pay their beer with a credit card.

Dude

[transporter_ii]

How about, instead of treating everyone like a potential criminal, you just treat the criminals like criminals?

For instance, there is already a law against violent acts, in England and the US. If someone gets drunk and does something violent, they could easily be punished under existing laws (and note you just punish them, not everybody. Imagine that).

And I don't know about England, but in the US, it is quite possible to keep someone out of clubs. It is a little thing called probation, and if you break it, they throw you back in jail. And believe me, they take probation violations very seriously, or at least I know the US does.

This is like one of those things where they make a law to be really tough on child murderers, only it is already against the law to murder a child!?!?! (What the hell, were we being easy on them before?).

So in other words, this law serves one of two purposes:

1) Someone wanted to make themselves look good, so they spend time trying to get stupid laws passed...and sometimes succeed.

2) This is yet another law designed to make sure that everyone is a potential criminal, passing so many laws that at any given time, everyone is going to be breaking some law or another. So when they get ready to round everybody up, you have a legal excuse to, because after all, they are criminals.

Transporter_ii

Re:Interesting.

[takeya]

Produce a fucking statistic why dont you.

And yes, I am proud to be a typical American.