Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
440-458)
MR MIKE
CRAIK
14 MAY 2009
Q440 Charlotte Atkins: From your
experience, and you may not be able to answer this, have there
been any advantages to having local licensing? I represent a relatively
rural area and clearly the sorts of applications you are going
to have in a market town are going to be very different to the
applications you might have in a city area. Has local licensing
been able to allow local licensing committees to reflect those
different demands in local areas?
Mr Craik: Yes. I will go back
to my experience in my force area. I think my licensing committees
and my officers work in a way, in terms of partnership, that they
did not previously. I think one of the benefits of that bit of
the 2003 Act has enabled us to engage in partnership in a much
more successful way. I think a lot depends on the relationship
with partners, where they are and how much influence they can
actually have. Again, it is difficult. We are always hoping we
are providing the service that the public want from us, but until
we ask them afterwards or until we hear the feedback from them,
we do not actually know. I would say partnership working in terms
of licensing applications and refusals and dealing with objections
has improved; it is still a bit short of working perfectly, I
think.
Q441 Charlotte Atkins: What about
the review of existing licences where there has been some concern
by local residents about the operating of a particular pub? Is
there any evidence that there is community involvement in refusing
licences for the future—reviewing licences and taking licences
away—because clearly there is one issue about licensing;
there is another issue about whether a licence should in fact
be revoked?
Mr Craik: You are talking to somebody
who does not sit on the licensing committee and does not see or
hear what the objections are or whether the outcomes are successful
in terms of those who object and those who do not. I would go
back to my original point. To be fair to licensing authorities
now, the rejections, refusals and revocations are very, very robustly
legally challenged, and that puts them in a very difficult position.
As much as local councillors may want to provide what local opinion
suggests is appropriate for them, they have to get everything
right, and that is quite a tough challenge.
Q442 Dr Taylor: Can you give us an
estimate, or is there any hard evidence, of the amount of crime
that is alcohol related on typical Friday, Saturday nights?
Mr Craik: Yes, I have provided
some written evidence. That is local stuff, and I think you need
to be very cautious on that. It looks to be about 15%. It is a
bit of a bureaucracy to get the officers to tick a box on a crime
form that indicates clearly to them, and unequivocally to the
point where they feel safe to do it, that it is alcohol related,
and you can see year by year that goes up. That is about us getting
more compliance and it is not an accurate picture. Fifteen per
cent is what it is at the moment. I would suspect it is lots more
than that. My own experience going out and arresting people is
that it is quite unusual to find people who are not in some way
involved in alcohol. It does not mean they are drunk. That is
another issue, the offence of drunkenness. It is people's behaviour
that gets them arrested, not the level of alcohol in their body.
One of my early campaigns around the "The Party is Over",
we arrested 9,000 people more for those sorts of offences in that
subsequent year, but 5,500 of those were for Public Order Act
offences, my strategy being early intervention. If you wait until
people are so drunk that they are drunk and incapable, you are
probably too late; they end up in the medical professionals hands
more likely than ours. Ours is that it is your behaviour that
gets you arrested. If you swear once you might get a warning;
if you swear twice, you gesticulate, you threaten, you get arrested
at that point. The degree of drink may not be drunk by a barman's
estimate, by your estimate, by mine, hence the use of Public Order
Act offence. Drunk and disorderly, again, does not require you
to be drunk and incapable, but to be arrested for drunkenness
does require you to be drunk and incapable. It is a cloudy picture,
but 15% is probably an absolute minimum. I would suggest it is
far more than that. I have anecdotally heard figures of around
40%, and I think if you start looking at domestic incidents as
well, domestic violence incidents where officers are called to
people's homes that do not result in crimes necessarily, I think
drink is a fairly usual factor in those sorts of events.
Q443 Dr Taylor: You obviously go
back quite some time. When you were a young copper on the street,
was it a rarity to have alcohol-related crime?
Mr Craik: No. The first two arrests
I made in Brick Lane as a PC in 1977 were two gentlemen who were
drunk and disorderly, both, sadly to say, from Newcastle. The
fact they hit me in the face with a cider bottle did not help!
Yes, that was, in fact, almost a drunk patrol actually, and we
had a van. We were young probationers. It was our task in those
days to look for the drunk and disorderly behaviour. So, yes,
it has been around. My father and grandfather were police officers,
and it goes back to 1921, and, yes, if they were alive they would
tell you the same story.
Q444 Dr Taylor: Has the Licensing
Act made a difference?
Mr Craik: In terms of overall
crime, and one of my colleagues has said this earlier, the overall
impact is largely neutral. There has been a temporal shift in
where offences occur. We have gone, fortunately, through a period
where crime has gone down, disorder has gone down year on year
on year across most of the country. Linking that to one single
act would be naive and irrational, but things have not got worse.
I think neutral is a fairly sensible expression of how it has
gone on.
Q445 Dr Naysmith: It is interesting
that earlier you used the distinction between drunk and disorderly
and public—. What was the phrase?
Mr Craik: Public Order Act offences.
Q446 Dr Naysmith: —Public Order
Act to pick people up early before they were absolutely intoxicated.
Yet we know that the law states that publicans should not serve
people who are intoxicated. Why is it that this law is not enforced?
Mr Craik: When I saw that, at
first I was slightly surprised, and then when we thought about
it and we discussed it, probably not. There are two reasons: one
is that it is useful in terms of putting pressure on. I have sat
and listened to earlier evidence today and I have met with the
industry before, and it is clear that the industry responds to
pressure—economic pressure, regulated pressure and legal
pressure—and the fact that we have that power to arrest
for drunkenness and for serving drunks, in my force alone we now
have 144 different pub-watch schemes that have banning orders
against individuals. Our view is that this enables us to say to
pubs, "Do you want to participate in partnership in dealing
with this issue, or do you want us to come and police it out of
you?" And guess what happens? We find another way of doing
business together. I do value partnership and I do value the industry's
participation in partnership; I just do not think they do it and
they would not do it timely if they were not regulated into it
or if the law did not make them comply with these sorts of changes.
The second bit is entirely about the practicality of policing.
Going into the premises that you described earlier, vertical drinking
premises, with 200 people in who have been drinking, trying to
pick out the one who got served and whether or not they were more
or less drunk than the others is a difficult task for a police
officer and a dangerous one actually. I have been out and done
this. What my officers do, it goes along the lines of if individuals
are troublesome and the bar staff are good enough to point that
out, or they are not, then: "Can you come outside, bonny
lad. I would like to have a chat with you", and then we deal
with them when we control the situation and they are not surrounded
by all their friends, and we have a far greater range of offences
and powers to deal with them on the street than we have in the
premises. So it is actually very sensible and practical to deal
with them in another way, and it also allows the licensee to be
grateful to us for relieving them of the burden and doing their
task for them, which means that when we speak to them later, together
with the licensing authorities, we get better co-operation, we
get better partnership.
Q447 Dr Naysmith: That all makes
a lot of sense and is easy to understand, and yet what is difficult
to understand is that there were only two prosecutions of publicans
in the whole country in 2006. How can that possibly be true?
Mr Craik: I think it goes along
the lines that activity is not a good measure. Are we getting
better outcomes in terms of managing town centre violence and
disorder in public houses? I think we are. It may sound facetious,
but it is not. We tend as a country to value a new Trident missile
system. I hope nobody is planning to use it real soon. Alcohol
disorder zones are like that as well. We do not have very many
of those. They are a powerful weapon in our pocket when it comes
to negotiating with licensed premises and town centre management
in terms of making sure we get much better compliance with people.
I understand the point around the lack of activity: the question
is should we now get rid of it because you do not use it? I would
be a little bit careful about doing that. There may come a time
when there are pubs where we are not getting compliance, we are
not getting co-operation where I would want to use it, or officers
would want to use it, although there are probably other ways of
closing a pub down if it is that difficult.
Q448 Dr Naysmith: There must be some
premises in the whole of your area that you have your suspicions
about, where there is more regular criminal activity or anti-social
disorder when the pub comes out than there are elsewhere. Do you
particularly target these premises?
Mr Craik: Yes, and one of the
things that we do value about co-operation with the licensing
trade is this end-to-end approach rather than just enforcement.
ACPO's view is that we have got enough laws, thanks, we do not
need any more, we are not sure we ought to be stripping any away,
but it is about getting the original plan right for a cafe society
and then building towards that, this trade shaping and all the
rest of it—"Can we be part of that, please?"—right
the way down to the individual management of public houses. When
police go into premises, which we do routinely, funnily enough
the behaviour changes. Getting the behaviour change is the important
bit; not catching people. Catching people is a means to an end
and a last resort means, "Can we do it some other way?",
but I would always like that big stick behind my back if I have
got to walk softly about the place and negotiate with people.
Q449 Stephen Hesford: I think you
just said, Mike, that you do not want any more laws, you have
got enough powers.
Mr Craik: At the moment that is
the ACPO view on licensing.
Q450 Stephen Hesford: That was my
question. So there is nothing that comes to mind in terms of additional
powers?
Mr Craik: No. In fact ACPO's position
at the moment is two-strand. We want to get into this and start
to develop partnerships, and this end-to-end management of drinking
in public places is something we should share together with our
partners, and we think that is absolutely right. It should not
just be an enforcement thing. The other thing we want to move
to is away from all this doom, gloom and disorder. There are places
in my area, and a lot across the country, of Legend—a big
market in Newcastle I had it thrown at me in this building earlier
this week. My wife and I eat there on a Friday night. You could
have a reign of terror with a balloon on a stick on a Thursday
evening. It is not the place of Legend, and I think it is time
to paint a more positive picture, talk a more positive narrative,
something like the Civil Trust, their Purple Flag Scheme, which
runs along the lines of green flags for parks, blue flags for
beaches, to start building some positive perceptions of the society
we want to enjoy safe, sensible social drinking in rather than
just having to manage the different places. If we can get moving
in that direction and accredit places that require very little
policing, then I can focus all my resources, not just on the places
that are the problem, but the people that are the problem. I come
back to the point I made earlier, it is misuse, mis-sale and misbehaviour.
Misbehaviour covers everything from urinating in the street to
murder. It is the people who do that, not alcohol itself and not
geography that is the key issue. So if I can focus more and more
of my efforts on dealing with the people who are the problem and
I can share that with other agencies—health, education and
so on and so forth—and we can find out who are the people
who cost our organisations the most money, who cause the most
harm to the community, what can we do divert them away from it
as well as interdict and deal with them, what can we do with them
and for them as well as to them. I do things to them—it
is what cops do—and then the next layer is: who are the
next generation? Who are the children, the siblings, the 10 year
olds, the seven year olds who in five or 10 years' time are going
to be the 15 year olds who are fighting and drinking in the town
centre, and what can we do with education, social services and
housing to divert them or prevent them ending up like, mum, dad
or their brother or sister? We want to see ourselves on a broader
path together with all the other agencies. The barrier to that
at the moment is sharing confidential information, but I believe
we can get round that.
Q451 Charlotte Atkins: In our last
evidence session we heard from a paramedic that they were finding
young people as young as 10 who had consumed too much drink and
were almost comatose in some situations. Are you finding that
that is the case in terms of the experience of your police forces,
that you are finding younger and younger people being picked up
having abused alcohol?
Mr Craik: Yes, I think our findings,
our views, would coincide with the research that was published
on 6 May that says there are fewer younger people drinking at
the moment, just, but they are drinking more, that the age group
is young, that adult males, 15 to 24, are drinking slightly less,
but they were always bad, and females of that age group are actually
getting worse. That would accord with our anecdotal view of life.
There are two types of vulnerability round this. When I have been
here today the conversation has been around what goes on amongst
adults who are allowed to drink in the evening, in the night-time
economy. The second problem for us are the kids who drink in the
parks, the streets, the housing estates and hang around. If I
ask my public, "What is your biggest problem?", it is
youth-related disorder and it is founded in alcohol. To what degree
that is we cannot measure, but everybody believes it is, that
is what the public think it is, and certainly we seize lots of
alcohol and we pour that away, and those powers have been really
useful for the cops, that power to exclude kids from gathering
together, make them move on and not come back for 24 or 48 hours,
a very practical bit of stuff, really useful. It makes the problem
go away and enables the public to see that somebody has done something,
and that is very powerful for the public. Rather than us turn
up, the kids are all quiet and behaving themselves but have hidden
the drink, even if we do not find the drink with them, we do not
catch them misbehaving. Previously we would walk away and leave
them and the public would think, "What good were they?"
Well now we can actually do something. That ability to be seen
to do something is very important, as is seizure, taking the drink
and pouring it away. It is a bit of a war of attrition. The first
time you find some kids with cans and pour the cans away, they
are not very happy, but it does not stop them doing it again.
You have to wear them down, you have to be persistent, and it
will take time to break through.
Q452 Stephen Hesford: Alcohol disorder
under the legislation: my understanding is that the partnerships
can charge retailers or outlets for the consequences of public
disorder?
Mr Craik: Yes.
Q453 Stephen Hesford: Does that get
used?
Mr Craik: It is a bit like arresting
for drunkenness for public purposes: it is all right with mum,
if you like. It is a very useful negotiating ploy and that is
how it tends to be used. Labelling somewhere an alcohol disorder
zone, a lot of local councils, I guess, are reluctant to label
their own communities—last resort stuff that—so I
would not expect, I never did expect that to be used a lot, but
it is very, very good for focusing people's attention on what
needs to be known in a particular area.
Q454 Stephen Hesford: You have heard
the discussion about minimum pricing. Does ACPO have a view on
minimum pricing?
Mr Craik: Yes, even before I became
the ACPO spokesperson on this I have always said price matters.
Alcohol Concern's evidence is clear, it is unequivocal, nobody
can come close to rebutting or refuting it today, and I have been
in these debates with the industry before. It even accommodates
what I think is a slightly specious and selfish argument around
punishing moderate drinkers. I do not quite buy that; but that
is a personal view, a professional view; not necessarily the ACPO
view. The ACPO view is price matters and their unit price approach
is very attractive. If you see the break down of how it impacts,
it impacts appropriately but disproportionately on the very cheap
stuff without impacting disproportionately on what people might
say is their reasonable price for drink. I do not think drink
is reasonably priced in this country for what it is and what harm
it does. I have just been to Singapore and I think £27 a
bottle is probably about right for wine. Yes, it hurts me, but
it does change my behaviour! Without wishing to sound facetious,
I have heard, "Why are you punishing me?", on numerous
chat shows late at night and early in the morning and there is
something of, "They wanted to take the pressures", that
comes across from people, and I think what Alcohol Concern propose
there is, "We are cops; we go and evidence; that is good
evidence", and we support that.
Chairman: Community Alcohol Partnerships:
are you familiar with them?
Mr Craik: Yes.
Q455 Chairman: I used a phrase out
of a publication about the one at St Neots in Cambridgeshire?
Mr Craik: I have not seen it;
I have heard a bit about it this morning.
Q456 Chairman: It does say 129 young
people were stopped and searched by the police. Stop and search
has a certain reputation to it in certain parts of this country.
Mr Craik: Yes.
Q457 Chairman: Is it helpful that alcohol
partnerships or community partnerships use phrases like this,
or do you take action like that, if it is as I understand what
stop and search means?
Mr Craik: I think that is probably
stop and seizure. I think that is probably unhelpful language,
certainly in London. It probably would not be noticed where I
come from, there would not be a sensitivity to that, but I do
understand there is a much better way of expressing that. Again,
it is one of those things. They are measuring an activity there;
that is not an outcome; that is not life getting better for the
people who live there, and I think we need to be a little bit
careful not to focus too much on activities unless it produces
an outcome in terms of satisfaction or confidence in the public
and should focus on: does a disorder go down? Does alcohol related
crime go down? Are we making a difference? In fact I do not think
that is particularly helpful.
Q458 Chairman: Could I thank you
very much indeed for coming along and helping us this afternoon
in this inquiry. I do not know when we will be finished with it,
I have to say.
Mr Craik: I will contact my colleagues
on the New Zealand issues.
Chairman: I would greatly appreciate
it if you could do that.
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