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Police should target troublesome drunks, A&E boss says | Police should target troublesome drunks, A&E boss says |
(about 7 hours later) | |
Police should crack down on binge drinking to stop hospital staff being distracted by disorderly drunks, a leading doctor has said. | |
Dr Clifford Mann, president of the College of Emergency Medicine, said the "softer approach" used for anti-social drunkenness did not seem to be working. | |
Police could instead increase arrests, convictions and fines, he suggested. | |
Police Federation chair Steve White said the police force did not have the resources for such an approach. | |
'Wasting resources' | |
Crime prevention minister Lynne Featherstone said the government was "determined to tackle alcohol-fuelled harm", which she said cost society around £21bn a year. | |
The coalition had improved the powers available to the police and licensing authorities to tackle alcohol-related crime, and had banned the "worst cases of very cheap and harmful alcohol sales", the Liberal Democrat MP said. | |
Speaking to the BBC, Dr Mann said: "All I am saying at the moment is the softer approach - where we don't any longer arrest many people for being drunk and disorderly - certainly doesn't seem to be working." | |
He said the number of people arriving at A&E units while drunk was increasing year on year, while the number of licensed premises in the UK was also increasing and alcohol was getting cheaper. | |
"I think these people, by the nature of the disorder, they are distracting medical and nursing staff from looking after other patients and therefore are wasting public resources," he said. | |
"I think they therefore fall into the category of being drunk and disorderly in their behaviour and the police can act to take them away." | |
Matter for education? | |
But Mr White told the BBC that cuts to the police force had left 16,000 fewer officers in the country so a "zero tolerance" policy was impossible. | |
He said police were also frustrated with having to deal with drunk people, and cells were already full with people in similar conditions every Friday and Saturday night. | |
He added that courts, social services, ambulances and the government all had a role to play in reducing the number of people getting drunk and disorderly - and not solely the police. | |