Slashdot Mirror
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."
In the united states we also have a system of reducing the effects of alcohol related violence. We call it prison.
Law! The cure to society's failures! That's what laws are for.
Laws built civilization, at reduced price.
Got a problem with something, just get together with some of your friends and write a law against it.
No need to address systemic issues. No need to worry about whether it's harmful to individuals. Human rights? But what about civilization? Laws are above you and me they're for the greater good.
Can I get a law. Cheers to that ol' chap Hammurabi. What greater gift to pass on to future generations than a bunch of laws? Better than trying to raise 'em up with values.
I am wondering how this will affect non-citizens of England, will U.S. or foreign visitors need to be fingerprinted as well and if so, that means that our fingerprints are in a foreign system, I am wondering how this info will be used, since the U.S. has demanded that the UK and all EU countries give the U.S. passenger data, will this info be used as a counter tactic to stop this practice.
Not enough.
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.
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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.
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Well, the UK has always had new crazy, privacy-destroying laws and powers. I find the English completely irrational considering how they go apeshit at the thought of a national ID card, but let things pass like continuous camera surveillance, excessive powers to any government instance, etc. Ripe for abuse. Maybe it's an Anglo-Saxon mindset?
Continental Europe is different - they're a bit more strict on privacy laws. There's always a big stink made when some stuff like this happens, like when euro passenger data is shared with the US, or like when SWIFT Belgium was/is passing loads of info on financial transactions to the US (again).
The US on the other has one thing going for it: constitutional protections, and associated with that, pretty good transparency. Whenever there's a new law project that might touch constitutional protections, there's usually some people that will notice, and there's quite a bit more public debate about it. To the point that Europeans probably know more about privacy-related laws in the US than in their own country.
This law has a major loophole. People without hands can visit any pub they like! I'm certain that we'll soon see an increase in alcohol-related violence by people with artificial hands, hooks, stumps, and the like.
Please, please, won't someone think of the children?!?! We need to implement alternative ID methods. Perhaps something like RFID chips implanted in artificial hands. We should also consider banning artificial limbs, hooks, and the like so these people cannot drink excessively and threaten our children. If we save the life of only one child, it will be worth it.
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Were you born during the 90's or something? I only ask because you seem to have completely missed what happened during the 80's. The MADD campaign? Ronald Reagan? Are you completely unaware that we no longer even have qualms about executing people who are mentally insane or retarded, let alone intoxicated at the time of their crimes? Are you a Libertarian completely unaware of drug laws? 3 strikes and you're out?
We don't even let people off in extreme cases such as the one you cited. =p
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".
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2033473, 00.html
As much as I agree with your "need to get verification" stance, it didn't take me more than 30 seconds to find this. And I believe the Times should be considered a reliable news source.
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.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Pretty similar to any other countrys internal politics. If I had told you that for the last 5 years, the majority of political debate in Norway has been about the new opera building, you probably wouldn't believe me. It's still true, and it's like this everywhere. Once you have an outside perspective, you are more able to see how silly people can become over a non-issue.
Thanks for the generalization. Southern USA is a bit different. They usually are Ku-klux Klan members.
Surprise! The US is not the only country with a constitution. Nor is it the first country with a constitution. Nor does the constitution seem to help USians much, as the various political fractions interpret the constitution as inventively as christians interpret the bible.
As for transparency; I thought US was the country where standard political practice was bill-amendments, so that by calling the new law "Child Protection Act", and amend some minor law about mandatory ID-cards to it, everybody would vote for it, since nobody has time to read all the amendments, and we must protect our children.
Look, just because you can read about it in your newspaper, doesn't mean that everyone else in the world reads the same newspaper. The silly little bickerings you have about privacy-laws in the US, interests us about the same as you would consider the debate about Oslos new opera building interesting. More to the point, people in civilized democracies (such as most of Europe) mostly ignores american politics, except that they dislike Bush, and thought Clinton was a jolly good fellow.
Secondly, in the eyes of most people in civilized democracies, US politics has mostly been dominated by rabid right-wing capitalists, dictated by powerful companies, since at least the 1960s. It's possible we will follow, but at least untill now, we have managed to keep the battle up for a little longer. And we have privacy laws, even laws that work!
Answer: there is no law that requires you to be finger printed if you want a pint. There is no government roll out of fingerprint checking before you can have a pint.
:-)
:-)
Slashdot is enjoying a nice hyped up headline, egged on by The Reg singing it up. Major towns and cities? one rural backwater population 40,000. We've had bigger towns voting for monkeys as their town mayor (Hull, go have a read). Have a sip of that nice warm beer and calm down
Reading TFA, one town has trialed a system. Little Britain jokes aside, we have more than half a dozen towns here
So we do have a law, the "Crime and Disorder Act (1998)" which requires town councils to reduce drunken disorder. One district council (in Yeovil, a nice little country place in rural Somerset, population 40,000) has decided the way to do this is to have fingerprint recognition, it's putting the pressure on pubs to install this system. It's using money from a government fund "Safer, Stronger Communities" through the Department for Communities and Local Government's Local Area Agreements. The government funder have already noted that its a local decision, not theirs, on how local town councils spend the money.
This "rollout" the article speaks of consists of ten pubs in a neighbouring small town considering it. Trust me, we have more than eleven pubs in the UK...
A couple of police forces elsewhere have "shown an interest" which suggests to me somebody's phoned up to ask how its doing. The district council representative (who you'd expect to be positive and not say "well we really wasted our taxpayers money on that one") has said the Home Office is considering trials in more towns (what does this mean? 5 pubs in each place?) - but the Home Office later in the article denies it decides how the budget is spent.
Bouncers do ask for ID for people they think are underage (under 18) in some pubs. But only those folks. I was amused when in the USA to be with a silver haired retired friend who was asked for his ID as well. I think he was quite amused and pleased that they were checking him in case he was under 21....
Not true. US immigration requires fingerprint and photograph also from all visitors from the visa waiver countries (eg all western europe, the 27 countries in the parent post). The China Daily article is clearly incorrect.
(As a frequent US traveller and German citizen I can confirm this firsthand.)
yes, this would cause a bit of a fuss, if it were true. The first I have heard about this is on Slashdot. The landlord of my local has not heard about it. Publicans have a lot of freedom over who they let in or don't let in to their public house. If a publican wants to install fingerprint scanners to control access then they would have the freedom to do that. Customers have the freedom not to go to that pub if they don't like it. Publicans also have the freedom to install bouncers who won't let in people they don't like the look of. Local authorities (not national government) who make licensing decisions have the freedom to be influenced in their decision about issuing/renewing a licence by looking at how the publican maintains an atmosphere of responsible drinking. I think this will fail for practical reasons (you will need a bouncer to stand by the machine - if you have a bouncer just let them make the decision, if you don't have a bouncer then people can walk past the machine). People who are registered drinkers can still arrive drunk, and it is illegal to serve alcohol to drunks. There is no way that this will be installed in country pubs.
I'm English. The story is being blown out of all proportion. It sounds like maybe a dozen pubs in 3 or 4 towns in the whole country MAY be introducing it. London isn't even mentioned.
The chances of your average British pub introducing this for a lunchtme drink are absolutely ZERO. Theres a pub in the UK practically every 10 paces. Any law that would make it harder for a British person to have a pint in his pub would go down about as well as a law to ban firearms in the US.
It's a total non story.
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I actually live just down the road from Yeovil. (or YeoVile). An aquiantance actually runs the main firm of bouncers in the town. He says that the fingerprint scanners started off in one of the clubs in town more or less as the owner is a gadget freak and just got a MS keyboard with fingerprint scanner. The club owner used it to get some free publicity in the local press. The regional press and tv picked it up and finally the story was on the main bbc news a few months ago. Governement has seen it and thought "Hang on a minute..."
Actually having your right index finger print taken in the clubs closed, non-government affilitated system is optional even in the bar that started it. YeoVile is a small town and the bouncers know all the main troublemakers personally by now. If someone comes in from out of town looking for trouble of course no system is going to stop them.
So all of this started out as a cheap publicity stunt by the owner of a small club in a small town and has got people the British government involved and now people all round the world are commenting on it... the guy must be laughing his head off.
another Roadkill on the Information Superhighway
You might find that the typical slashdotter might go apeshit over ID cards, but you misrepresent the feelings of the English. Every single poll that's ever been done in the UK about ID cards has shown the majority to be in favour.
As to CCTVs, yes the British like them because it makes them feel less at threat from crime on the street, and that there will be less vandalism. And with good reason. Crime in the UK has fallen 44% since 1995, violent crime down 43%, and vandalism down 19%.
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs06/hosb1206.
I still don't like the fingerprinting bit - it seems like it's begging for someone to abuse it.
First they take your guns, then they take your beer. Bastards.
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So yes, the English are qualified to make references to Big Brother. But people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
At least, not if a camera is pointed in their direction.
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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.
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The U.S> has the largest prison population (over 2 million) and the highest rate of prisoners per capita at 715 per 100,000. source: NationMaster
harmonious design
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?
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We have all kinds of tough new drunk driving enforcement over here, too. Though thankfully short of fingerprinting people going into clubs. The net effect is people who are problem drinkers drink anyway and responsible people, many of whom don't like the police gettin' up in their business, stay home. Instead we'll have private parties, where our guests can stay the night. Just like I'm guessing a lot of people will skip their pint at the pub because being fingerprinted seems sort of creepy.
You might think that's a responsible solution and you'd be right. The downside is for people trying to run a business. The more enforcement, the more responsible people stay home. It's getting to the point we don't go out on weekends at all. Who wants to run the road block gauntlet just to go out to eat and dancing for a couple hours?
More enforcement is always easy from a political point of view. It's a feel good thing to do that doesn't really work, but since when do results matter in political solutions? I'm not sure there are any easy answers. But I can say for sure, the tougher you get on enforcement, the more your business and entertainment district is going to suffer.
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Just FYI for the non-brits, being "pissed" over there is drunk, not "pissed" as in angry in the states.
That may clarify what is a bit confusing as the slang differs.
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