Meaningless Alcohol-related Statistics Of The Day

From The Daily Echo-o-o:

The “enormous” toll of excessive drinking on Britain’s emergency services is laid bare in a new parliamentary report. Police, ambulance and A&E personnel face a risk of violence and verbal abuse as they attend drink-fuelled incidents, the inquiry found.

Those are clearly punishable offences, the good news is that in most cases, the perpetrators won’t be hard to identify and/or arrest. The other news is that alcohol consumption in the UK has been falling for years, so unless they want to claim that this overall decline results from a large number of people drinking less masking a smaller people drinking a lot more, their whole thesis fails.

The report from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Alcohol Harm painted a stark picture of the scale of resources devoted to dealing with alcohol misuse. It called for a number of steps including lowering the drink drive alcohol limit and introducing a minimum unit price for alcohol.

Drink driving is already – rightly – a criminal offence, but don’t they do the damage by crashing, not by stepping out of the vehicle and assaulting emergency services? And what on earth does minimum pricing have to do with this anecdotal..?

One statement [from a police officer] said: “I can take my team through a licensed premise, and by the time I take them out the other end, they will have been felt up several times.”

a) Well bloody arrest them on the spot.
b) Pubs seem to operate maximum pricing anyway, so any minimum price will not affect the behaviour of people in pubs and clubs.
c) It’s probably being in a crowd rather than being drunk which makes people think they can get away with feeling up female coppers.

MPs and peers took evidence from police officers, fire crew and paramedics. In one area, 86% of police officers surveyed had been assaulted by people who had been drinking.

Sorry to say, but being assaulted verbally or physically is one of the risks of being a copper, and we can assume that most coppers have been assaulted a few times, the fact that most of them have been assaulted at least once by somebody who was drunk is hardly surprising. The article does not say how often fire crews and paramedics are assaulted, so again, we can safely assume it is a much lower figure (although not something we can brush aside as a risk of the job).