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: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".

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?