NCJ Number
204058
Date Published
2003
Length
28 pages
Annotation
This chapter reviews the evaluation of three British problem-oriented policing projects funded under the Targeted Policing Initiative (TPI); the aim of all three projects was to reduce "alcohol-related" crime.
Abstract
The "Tackling Alcohol-Related Street Crime" (TASC) project in Cardiff focused on two city-center police sectors. The other two projects -- Operation Amethyst in Cornwall and the Nottinghamshire Alcohol Related Crime (NARV) -- each covered an entire county. The TASC project aimed to prevent violence and disorder both inside licensed premises and on the city-center streets; whereas, the Amethyst and NARV projects primarily targeted offenses that occurred inside licensed premises. All three projects used special databases that were constructed to track incidents associated with specific licensed premises (TASC recorded data on alcohol-related violence or disorder in the street as well). This chapter describes and assesses the value of these databases, both as a practical aid to the work of the project and as a tool for measuring the effectiveness of the intervention. The chapter first provides an overview of the nature of the problem to be addressed and previous responses to it; it then addresses issues of definition for "alcohol-related crime." This is followed by a description of the aims, approaches, and interventions adopted by the three projects, with attention to how their databases were constructed and used. The main evaluation findings are then summarized. The projects generally produced mixed results and the evaluations revealed the development of structures of cooperation between police and alcohol-serving establishments that hold promise for curtailing problem behavior related to alcoholic beverage consumption. The lessons drawn by the authors from the analyses of the project evaluations focus on the relationship between the scope and nature of the crime data collected and the problem-solving strategies developed. The authors recommend appointing a dedicated data analyst to produce and maintain a special database that encompasses multiple sources of data. Also, the database should be started in advance of any significant set of interventions in order to create a baseline against which to measure the impact of the interventions. In the long-term, the data-collection task could be facilitated if officers were trained and encouraged to "flag" relevant incidents in a consistent manner and if incidents were recorded so that they could be searched electronically for the presence of specific factors, such as the consumption of alcohol or location in or outside licensed premises. 3 tables, 1 figure, 6 notes, and 28 references