The American "super-cop" brought in by England's Home Office to cut the country's crime rate warned last night that the nation's binge drinking culture was spiraling out of control and fueling an epidemic of violence outside pubs and clubs that threatened to overwhelm the police.
In his first major interview the former Boston police chief, Paul Evans, described scenes he had witnessed in the early hours of the morning in city centers across Britain as chaos.
"I'm not sure it can get much worse," he said, in response to police fears that new licensing laws allowing 24-hour drinking would lead to increased violence.
As the government prepares to put tackling crime and antisocial behavior at the heart of this week's Queen's Speech, Evans is now considering new proposals from senior police officers for tough new sanctions against violent drinkers.
One measure would see binge drinkers caught fighting in city centers given points on their driving licenses. Another would give antisocial behavior orders to offenders, banning them from high-crime nightspots.
Evans, appointed last September as the head of the Home Office's police standards unit, will launch a "Christmas blitz" next month to crack down on alcohol-related offenses using on-the-spot penalty fines, sting operations on businesses serving under-age drinkers and closure notices on pubs and clubs associated with violence.
"If you're in the business of fighting crime, then you have to be in the business of dealing with the alcohol issue," Evans said. "I have spent an awful lot of Fridays and Saturday nights out there. At 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning these places are chaos.
Government research shows that 44 percent of violent crime is alcohol-related and that 70 percent of hospital admissions on weekends are associated with drinking.
In preparation for the campaign, the Home Office has raised spot fines from ?40 to ?80 for selling alcohol to under-18s, underage drinking itself, disorderly behavior while drunk in a public place and public drunkenness.
The courts were given the power to issue driving bans for non-traffic offenses earlier this year. But Evans has been informed that senior police want beat officers to issue fines much like speeding-tickets, which would attract points on their driving license.
Police officers have complained that on-the-spot fines in themselves do not deter affluent drinkers determined to get into a fight. Other measures under consideration by Evans include a "three strikes and you're out" system in which persistent offenders would receive an automatic anti-social behavior order after a third fixed penalty for an alcohol-related offense.
Evans also revealed that his unit is now targeting 24 towns and inner city areas that account for a quarter of violent crime. The areas range from northern former industrial towns to south coast tourist resorts.
The news comes in advance of today's queen's speech in which the Prime Minister will unveil new measures to crack down on crime. These include curbs on anti-social behavior, organized crime, illegal immigration and drugs -- including plans to force more addicts into detox treatment. New measures to crack down on alcohol-related crime are expected to include sanctions against nightspots consistently associated with violence and under-age drinking as well as drinkers themselves.
Feb. 9 to Feb.15 Growing up in the 1980s, Pan Wen-li (潘文立) was repeatedly told in elementary school that his family could not have originated in Taipei. At the time, there was a lack of understanding of Pingpu (plains Indigenous) peoples, who had mostly assimilated to Han-Taiwanese society and had no official recognition. Students were required to list their ancestral homes then, and when Pan wrote “Taipei,” his teacher rejected it as impossible. His father, an elder of the Ketagalan-founded Independence Presbyterian Church in Xinbeitou (自立長老會新北投教會), insisted that their family had always lived in the area. But under postwar
In 2012, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) heroically seized residences belonging to the family of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “purchased with the proceeds of alleged bribes,” the DOJ announcement said. “Alleged” was enough. Strangely, the DOJ remains unmoved by the any of the extensive illegality of the two Leninist authoritarian parties that held power in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan. If only Chen had run a one-party state that imprisoned, tortured and murdered its opponents, his property would have been completely safe from DOJ action. I must also note two things in the interests of completeness.
Taiwan is especially vulnerable to climate change. The surrounding seas are rising at twice the global rate, extreme heat is becoming a serious problem in the country’s cities, and typhoons are growing less frequent (resulting in droughts) but more destructive. Yet young Taiwanese, according to interviewees who often discuss such issues with this demographic, seldom show signs of climate anxiety, despite their teachers being convinced that humanity has a great deal to worry about. Climate anxiety or eco-anxiety isn’t a psychological disorder recognized by diagnostic manuals, but that doesn’t make it any less real to those who have a chronic and
When Bilahari Kausikan defines Singapore as a small country “whose ability to influence events outside its borders is always limited but never completely non-existent,” we wish we could say the same about Taiwan. In a little book called The Myth of the Asian Century, he demolishes a number of preconceived ideas that shackle Taiwan’s self-confidence in its own agency. Kausikan worked for almost 40 years at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reaching the position of permanent secretary: saying that he knows what he is talking about is an understatement. He was in charge of foreign affairs in a pivotal place in
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