England Starts Fingerprinting Drinkers 552
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."
Re:Ummm... not (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Ummm... not (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Applies to only drinkers? (Score:3, Informative)
Probably not, unless you happen to pick a pub which is notorious for alcohol-fuelled violence in the evenings. Usually, such establishments have a negative correlation with serving decent food and beer, so I doubt either of us will be personally affected by this, at least initially. Definitely something to keep an eye on, though.
Answer: slashdot headline, misleading as usual :-) (Score:5, Informative)
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....
Re:Europeans, Canadians are exempt. (Score:5, Informative)
(As a frequent US traveller and German citizen I can confirm this firsthand.)
Re:How Long Before They Tie This Into Insurance DB (Score:3, Informative)
it isn't true so we have not gone apeshit. (Score:5, Informative)
PA liquor laws (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, just nitpicking. It does have some of the most bizarre liquor laws of anywhere I've ever been to. I can only pity the poor coddled European who might wind up in Pennsylvania, desiring a case of wine on a Sunday, or something similarly impossible.
Re:Applies to only drinkers? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Answer: slashdot headline, misleading as usual (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Interesting. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Interesting. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Fingerprinting drinkers? WTF??? (Score:4, Informative)
I still don't like the fingerprinting bit - it seems like it's begging for someone to abuse it.
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Informative)
How, exactly, would this work anyway? Are they proposing even longer queues to get into pubs, and mandatory security personnel at the doors of all licensed premesis? How would they determine if you've crept in (say, via the beer garden, many of which couldn't easily have access controlled without fundamental modification) without fingerprinting? If you went in to the garden, would you need to be rechecked every time you went back in? Maybe they'd need to fingerprint all customers as part of the sale, and reject if it didn't match one of their live entries - I can see that being popular with staff...
This system is for city centre or other drinking venues where troublemakers regularly go. The sort of place that already has doormen at the one or two available entrances.
Re:Interesting. (Score:1, Informative)
actually THE highest (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)
an addendum to being "pissed" (Score:5, Informative)
That may clarify what is a bit confusing as the slang differs.
Re:Interesting. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Interesting. (Score:2, Informative)
Tattooing the face actually was a punishment in ancient China. That was getting off light, compared to the other common penalties of lopping off the nose, feet, genitals, or head. The Legalists of the Han dynasty were the original "tough on crime" crusaders.
Re:Interesting. (Score:3, Informative)
A large percentage of murders are organized crime related, and there is no way to stop criminals with significant resources from accessing guns. Much of the rest of murders are crimes of passion, which in most cases don't require sophisticated weaponry.
What they really ask in the polls (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I question the methodology they use for the polls in the first place. The vast majority of those I've seen cited in the media are government-funded, and carried out by the kind of organisation one hires when one already knows the result required.
Having seen the full list of questions they asked in a couple of cases, it usually goes something like this:
What they fail to mention is that:
You show me a study that presents both the questions at the top of this post and the verifiable facts afterwards in a balanced way and then tells me the majority of the population wants ID cards, and I'll believe my failure to encounter a single person who speaks favourably of them is just a matter of moving in different circles. Until then, it's just lying with statistics, and you can conduct as many polls as you like but still you have no meaningful information about how the population as a whole would feel on the issue if it had a balanced knowledge of the potential advantages and potential risks.
In the UK "pissed" is also known as (Score:2, Informative)
drunk
mullered
wasted
trashed
beanoed
trolleyed
badgered
rat-arsed
ratted
tight
lashed
When out drinking on can be:
on the piss
out on the lash
on the badger
on the raz
having a couple of sherberts
and many many more...
Note that I've been all over the country and some of the slang is very localised. If anyone can contribute some more to the education of the site in expressing their state of disrepair...