Alcohol Awareness Week – ‘Alcohol and Cost’
Speaking at the start of Alcohol Awareness Week, David Sidwick and Joy Allen, the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners’ Addiction and Substance Misuse Leads, have highlighted the huge costs of alcohol-related crime and anti-social behaviour to policing and communities and have called on PCCs to take this opportunity to audit and review the action they are taking locally.
Joy Allen, PCC for Durham said:
“We all know that excessive alcohol consumption can significantly affect a person’s health. It is also strongly linked with a wide range of criminal offences including drink driving, drunk and disorderly behaviour and violent crime, including sexual violence and domestic abuse. It has been estimated that 2 in 5 violent crimes are alcohol related, with a similar proportion of adult victims of sexual assault saying the perpetrator was under the influence of alcohol.”
Dave Sidwick PCC for Dorset said:
“As PCCs, we want to encourage people to enjoy alcohol responsibly and to reduce the negative cost on society. We can do this, for example, by working with bars, clubs and other venues to make our night-time economies safer; investing through the Safer Streets fund in CCTV, street lighting, etc; testing and pioneering new approaches like “sobriety tagging”; and helping the criminal justice system to get offenders into alcohol treatment and recovery services that benefit them and cut crime.’
For ‘Alcohol Awareness Week’, the APCC’s leads are asking PCCs to review the actions they and their teams are taking locally to reduce the crime-costs of alcohol related crime. To support this, they have launched a checklist for PCCs and their offices, which has been developed with the new national Alcohol Related Crime and Homicide Taskforce on which they sit as PCC leads. The checklist is intended as a simple, useful tool to support discussions of alcohol-related crime, its costs and the solutions locally.