Does Increasing Community and Liquor Licensees’ Awareness, Police Activity, and Feedback Reduce Alcohol-Related Violent Crime? A Benefit-Cost Analysis

Christopher Doran,Anthony Shakeshaft,Héctor Navarro,Dennis Petrie

doi:10.3390/ijerph10115490

Abstract

Approximately half of all alcohol-related crime is violent crime associated with heavy episodic drinking. Multi-component interventions are highly acceptable to communities and may be effective in reducing alcohol-related crime generally, but their impact on alcohol-related violent crime has not been examined. This study evaluated the impact and benefit-cost of a multi-component intervention (increasing community and liquor licensees’ awareness, police activity, and feedback) on crimes typically associated with alcohol-related violence. The intervention was tailored to weekends identified as historically problematic in 10 experimental communities in NSW, Australia, relative to 10 control ones. There was no effect on alcohol-related assaults and a small, but statistically significant and cost-beneficial, effect on alcohol-related sexual assaults: a 64% reduction in in the experimental relative to control communities, equivalent to five fewer alcohol-related sexual assaults, with a net social benefit estimated as AUD$3,938,218. The positive benefit-cost ratio was primarily a function of the value that communities placed on reducing alcohol-related harm: the intervention would need to be more than twice as effective for its economic benefits to be comparable to its costs. It is most likely that greater reductions in crimes associated with alcohol-related violence would be achieved by a combination of complementary legislative and community-based interventions.

Highlights

The negative consequences of alcohol misuse impose a significant burden of harm on society [1], primarily through increased alcohol-related social disruption, violence, crime and economic costs [2,3,4,5]
Increasing community and liquor licensees’ awareness about violent crimes associated with alcohol, increasing police activity at high-risk times, and providing feedback on efforts to reduce those crimes appears to have no effect on alcohol-related assaults on problematic weekends, and a small, but statistically significant, effect on alcohol-related sexual assaults: a 64% reduction in the experimental communities which is equivalent to five fewer alcohol-related sexual offences
The economic analysis showed that the apparent reduction in alcohol-related sexual assaults was cost beneficial, achieving a net social benefit AUD $3,938,218, this benefit-cost was only positive because it included the value communities place on reducing alcohol-related harm, rather than because the number of incidents averted outweighed the cost of the intervention

Summary

Introduction

The negative consequences of alcohol misuse impose a significant burden of harm on society [1], primarily through increased alcohol-related social disruption, violence, crime and economic costs [2,3,4,5]. In Australia, alcohol-related crime alone accounted for 11% of the total social cost of alcohol misuse in 2004/2005, costing an estimated AUD$1.7 billion [5]. Multi-component interventions are highly acceptable to communities [21] and may be effective in reducing alcohol-related crime [14,22,23,24]. The AARC project showed that multi-component interventions can be cost-beneficial, estimating that for every

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