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

Interesting.

[Shanoyu]

In the united states we also have a system of reducing the effects of alcohol related violence. We call it prison.

Re:Interesting.

[technicalandsocial]

Alcohol, and all drugs, should be treated as the health issue they are, not a criminal issue. Violence on the other hand should be given far more severe penalities for any and all violent offences. We're all way to forgiving to violent crimes, we need a real deterrent.
As TFA states, domestic violence had risen during their trial period. Keeping violence behind closed doors is helping no one.

Re:Interesting.

[TapeCutter]

Alcoholics are like herion addicts, they care about little else except where the next "hit" will come from.

"I don't really know how someone can get to be so smashed and out of control that you don't want to serve them liquor and simultaneously they somehow don't break any other law except perhaps public intoxication."

Commonly known as a "happy drunk", they are an entirely different breed to the violent alcoholic. Here in Oz and I think also in UK, the law states you can't serve someone who is already "intoxicated", they don't have to be "out of control" just obviously pissed.

Someone who is totally pissed is not much trouble in the violence dept, it's the ones that are loud, aggressive and still standing that cause problems, they are certainly cognicent enough to remember they gave their prints and will think about their next drink!

Re:Interesting.

[PSC]

We're all way to forgiving to violent crimes, we need a real deterrent.

While I agree that violent crimes should be punished severely, deterrence is unlikely to work, because deterrence assumes that the attacker considers the consequences of his actions. More often than not, this is just not the case, especially under influence.

Skirting the system?

[Salvance]

In all seriousness, I wonder how many alcoholics and repeat drunk driving offenders will look for ways to skirt the system? If employed nationwide, a cottage industry of fingerprint concealment/modification techniques could pop up that eventually could negatively impact other areas of crime prevention.

Also, how are they going to prevent people from drinking themselves into a stupor at a friend's home then getting in the car? In the end, this could be a pretty significant blow for the bars and restaurants, kind of like the smoking ban in some U.S. cities.

punish everyone & you're sure to punish the gu

[macadamia_harold]

Bradburn noted the system had a 'psychological effect' on offenders.

No doubt it has psychologican effects on everyone. You know, that creepy feeling you get when you're being watched.

Re:how will this affect non-citizens

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realise that all visitors to the US are fingerprinted on arrival at the airport?

Re:Wow

[Matt Perry]

Seems lots of people across the pond love to quote 1984 and make references to Big Brother about nearly every single political story about the United States.

Pot. Kettle. #000000

Are you kidding me? A guy from their country wrote 1984 over 50 years ago. They have cameras on nearly every street corner. If anything I think they are qualified to "make references to Big Brother".

The real problem

[iendedi]

The real problem with any system that tracks behavior, especially vice-like behavior, is that it is only a matter of time before powerful interests secure access to that data. Fingerprint drinkers today, in the hands of insurance companies tomorrow. Fingerprint pub-crawlers today, in the hands of employment agencies tomorrow. Fingerprint drunks today, in the hands of law-enforcement and government interests tomorrow.

Abuse slowly unfolds, it does not spring into existance overnight. Almost everything that is seriously broken in America started off as an innocent (often temporary) stopgap measure to correct some issue of the day but then slowly grew, was hijacked by various interests and warped into an aberration.

I am personally against any tracking of human beings at all and I could give a god damned about the whinning of law enforcement. The simple fact is that once such data is available to law enforcement, it is also available to criminals and interests that are not working for my benefit and since I am a law abiding citizen, there is absolutely no upside for me - only increased scrutiny and loss of privacy. Only the stupidest of criminals will expose themselves through these channels anyway. The smart criminals belong to syndicates that fscking include law enforcement (and therefore have access to this *data* for nefarious purposes).

Reject tracking, profiling and surveillance in all it's guises. Demand court issued warrants for private data. Retain your rights and your personal security.

Re:how will this affect non-citizens

[Knuckles]

Good luck with your absolute belief in the state.

V for Vendetta...it's happening.

[sbaker]

I was watching the movie "V for Vendetta" again last night - as a graphic novel that was written in 1982 it's eerily predictive. For a movie made two years ago, it's practically a documentary.

I'm a Brit who has been living in the USA for the past 13 years and it's hard to say which is more like the movie. Britain with more spycams per person than anywhere else on earth - and soon you can't even have a beer without being fingerprinted! Or perhaps it is the USA in which the faceless secret police can monitor what books you check out from the library, bug your phone without judicial oversight and swoop down on you, merely accuse you of being a terrorist (no proof required) and on that pretext lock you up, torture you, ship you off to god-knows what hell-hole - and all without any right of trial or appeal?

Hmmm - hard call. Between the two countries - it's difficult to say which comes closest to the nightmare that V opposes in the movie. As he says: If you want to know whose fault this is - just look in the mirror.

Our own fear of statistically insignificant terrorist violence (or avian flu or WMD or drunk drivers or...you name it) induces progressively higher tolerance for the State to ratchet down the human rights of the entire population. There will come a point when we realise that this has been a terrible mistake - but will we do that before or after the point where we can no longer reverse it's effects?

Better get that bulk order for Guy Fawkes masks in before the rush. Amazon have them for $5.99.

Statistics!?!

[sbaker]

Hold on - the linked article says that this scheme is proven to work because in the Yeoville area alcohol related violence had dropped 48% over the trial period. It then went on to say that over that eight month period there were only TWO major incidents. So if there had been (say) four major incidents over the preceeding eight months - which reduced to two during the trial - that would have been a 50% reduction.

(Note that one of those two major incidents wasn't even anything to do with pubs - some kids were at an under-18's disco and obtained alcohol "somewhere else" - it shouldn't even have been counted).

I have two observations:

Firstly: I would submit that whether there were two or four major incidents over a period of eight months is not a statistically valid sample. Especially because the preceeding 8 months would have included Xmas and New Year - both notable occasions for serious drunkenness. No competent statistician or conductor of scientific tests would sign up to these conclusions from such a ridiculously small sample - so we should either conclude that they are invalid - or that they were actually counting something else...which leads me to:

Secondly: For a number like '48%' to have come about, we cannot be measuring a reduction from four to two major crimes - that would be a 50% reduction. This MUST have been taken over a vastly larger sample of incidents. We must conclude then that they are not talking about 'major' incidents such as the two described (a sexual attack in the toilets and a fight between two kids that erupted into a major street brawl). So what this fingerprinting exercise is all about is reducing MINOR incidents.

So let's call this what it is. It's not about cutting down on serious offences - it's about reducing MINOR offences by banning people from pubs who happen to have lost their tempers or done any of the usual things that drunk people tend to do.

Is that worth the loss of privacy that this entails?

Re:how will this affect non-citizens

[Qzukk]

You're up against crime labs who stand up under oath in court and lie through their teeth, and somehow, the prosecutors never get around to prosecuting them for perjury.

You're up against prosecutors who rely on things like the public's belief that DNA tests are 100% accurate and that only one person could possibly have "that DNA" when "that DNA" used to be actually just a match against the presence or absense of 16 or so genes... with only 65536 possible combinations (at 16 markers). While new tests can exactly match one DNA sample to another, DNA "fingerprints" as espoused by the government continue to focus only on a limited number of "markers" meaning that dozens, possibly hundreds of people in a large city will share the same "fingerprint".

You're up against district attourneys who think DNA testing is awesome, unless it's used to prove one of their convicts innocent. Clearly if two people raped the woman, and two people's DNA was retrieved, and the convicted person turned out to be neither of them, the woman must have forgotten the third rapist, rather than picked out the wrong person on a lineup.

As the other person said, "good luck with your absolute belief in the state", and may God help us all.