This article in The Punch this morning perfectly sums up the wrong ideas that some people have about the role of police in society.
Michael McShane, an ex-police officer and current managing director of the company that produces Jack Daniels (!) wants to ban public drunkeness and give the police resources to enforce this ban.
Giving the police the power to enforce a law that is by it’s very nature ambiguous (there is no real sure way to know someone is drunk as one man’s drunk person is another man’s exhuberant idiot), and then telling them to enforce it in a high-stress high-hostility situation like a city street full of night clubs is just asking for trouble.
But of course, it suits the liquor industry to have the public purse pay for high-visibility policing rather than to have to bear the cost of reduced sales and higher taxes.
