England Starts Fingerprinting Drinkers
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Oct 22, 2006 12:37 AM
from the you-are-not-free-to-drink-the-beer dept.
from the you-are-not-free-to-drink-the-beer dept.
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."
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England Starts Fingerprinting Drinkers
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Interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://misctxt.blogspot.com/)
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://misctxt.blogspot.com/)
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday February 13 2007, @05:31PM)
"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!
an addendum to being "pissed" (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.deftracing.com/)
That may clarify what is a bit confusing as the slang differs.
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
As TFA states, domestic violence had risen during their trial period. Keeping violence behind closed doors is helping no one.
Re:Interesting. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Interesting. (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.xs4all.nl/~dverbeek)
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Interesting. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.edgeio.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 09 2005, @10:42AM)
And that is why you're one of the countries in the world with the highest percentage of your population in prison, surpassing many oppressive dictatorships. Despite that you still have some of the highest crime rates in the world too...
Doesn't look like it's working too well.
actually THE highest (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.wavetheory.org/)
Re:Interesting. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://127.31.33.7/)
Wow. You completely fail at grasping even the basics of the scientific method.
Your train-wreck of a thought process could only be used as reasoning for anything if a statistically significant number of areas were selected, and half of them (randomly selected) were subjected to a gun ban. That would be the starting point.
Your statistic is more than meaningless. High-crime areas are probably much more likely to take on gun bans than low-crime areas.
Thanks for playing. Please return to your 6th grade science class.
Statistics!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.sjbaker.org/)
(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:Interesting. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Now the question is (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
it isn't true so we have not gone apeshit. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
(http://snarfangel.blogspot.com/)
At least, not if a camera is pointed in their direction.
Law (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
how will this affect non-citizens (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:how will this affect non-citizens (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:how will this affect non-citizens (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:how will this affect non-citizens (Score:5, Funny)
Re:how will this affect non-citizens (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:how will this affect non-citizens (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [truthinjustice.org]. 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.
Re:Europeans, Canadians are exempt. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~heraklit/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 30 2002, @04:02PM)
(As a frequent US traveller and German citizen I can confirm this firsthand.)
Re:how will this affect non-citizens (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.talklets.com/)
But a 5 yearold! (I know, I know - think of the...). But seriously, fingerprinting an adult before they consume an intoxicant proven to lead to violence (or rather increase the likelyhood thereof) is one thing. Even watching us via CCTV, is not an entirely bad thing. It has reduced violent crime. But the insane tactics being touted in the States (ID cards, agents visiting you for joking about killing the Pres on the internet, retina scans for 5 year olds, asking me to state what my political affiliations are BEFORE I enter the country...) If you can't see the difference between these then you are not very far sighted, and/or you don't know a great deal of about the practices already in place in the States, and how eerily they compare to those used by the Nazis, to control their own population. Why do people in Europe winge on about the Nazis, because they made death factories. They industrialized murder. What more reason do you want? And they couldn't have done it without ID cards, and a terrified populous. CCTV actually makes me safer, and feel safer. ID cards do not. Fingerprints are an invasion of my privacy, but so is someone taking my photo. You going to ban that in the name of personal freedom?
Skirting the system? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.saynotocrack.com/ | Last Journal: Friday February 09 2007, @03:02AM)
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.
Re:Skirting the system? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.rslittle.com/)
Re:Skirting the system? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Skirting the system? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but I can only think that I've managed to find the only town in England (London) that doesn't turn into a battleground, as in 12 years of doing so I've seen exactly one fight, that was between just two people, and the antagonist legged it before anything even slightly serious happened.
Perhaps I'm just lucky, as I have certainly heard stories, seen the "police eye view" TV shows, etc, but based on my own experience there simply isn't a problem. YMMV, and clearly does.
Re:Skirting the system? (Score:4, Interesting)
According to the media though, everytime I go into the city centre on a Saturday night and come home alive I should be thanking the God of my choice for a lucky escape.
Applies to only drinkers? (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Answer: slashdot headline, misleading as usual (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.htmler.org/)
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:Applies to only drinkers? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.positech.co.uk/)
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:Is responsibility too much to ask for? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://misctxt.blogspot.com/)
We don't even let people off in extreme cases such as the one you cited. =p
punish everyone & you're sure to punish the gu (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.google.com/)
No doubt it has psychologican effects on everyone. You know, that creepy feeling you get when you're being watched.
But what about artificial limbs? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://restifo.smugmug.com/)
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.
The real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday August 01 2003, @07:18PM)
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.
Fingerprinting drinkers? WTF??? (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 12 2006, @03:31PM)
It mentions "alchohol-related crimes", but it seems to me that the only time you ever actually know that any particular crime was genuinely alchohol related is if you already know who the person that did it was, and it's only then that you realize that they are under the influence of alchohol. What do you need fingerprints taken beforehand for when every single time you'd be able to pin a crime on alchohol consumption you have the guilty party in custody anyways?
About the only good this might do is produce a sort of "scare tactic" effect, that might initially incline people to behave better, but I don't see this making a significant difference in the long run.
Re:Fingerprinting drinkers? WTF??? (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.edgeio.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 09 2005, @10:42AM)
I still don't like the fingerprinting bit - it seems like it's begging for someone to abuse it.
Make some fake fingerprints to fool the scanners (Score:3, Funny)
Thinking about how easy these scanners are to fool, someone should create a fingerprint patch and supply a copy to everyone in town. It'll look like one guy goes drinking way too much. It'd be even better if the finger print was of some semi-important or visible offical who's in favor of this legislation. I'm thinking about how the Mythbusters people lifted a fingerprint from a can and used that to create a fake fingerprint to fool a scanner.
V for Vendetta...it's happening. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.sjbaker.org/)
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.
Re:V for Vendetta...it's happening. (Score:4, Funny)
(http://mahood.net/)
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?
They have to accuse you, lock you up, ship you off to god-knows what hell-hole, and ONLY THEN can they torture you.
Please stop spreading these malicious slanders, or the terrorists win.
Mark
PS Please check your irony-meter before moderating this post, thank you.
Unintended consequences (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.dangercollie.com/music/)
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.
Re:Ummm... not (Score:5, Informative)
(http://mangahowto.dnsdojo.org/howto/)
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.