Police struggle to deal with weekend booze-related crime

By SCOTT MacLEOD

The morning after the night before, New Zealand's busiest police cells are smeared with all manner of human waste.

Patrol cars and paddy wagons bring as many as 20 people an hour into Auckland's central station on Friday and Saturday nights, more than 90 per cent of them picked up for drunkenness or booze-related crime.

The stroppy ones are placed in small, bare cells with no furniture or toilet to smash.

Their body waste flows under cell doors into a drain in the corridor.

Those who might be suicidal are locked in cells equipped with cameras, and the rest go into standard cells to sober up.

Four constables, a sergeant and a fingerprinter/photographer work flat-out on paperwork and assessments that can take 30 minutes for each arrest.

Welcome to the front line of liquor-related crime in New Zealand.

Sergeant Greg Sowter, who is often in charge of the cells, said they were like cesspits by Monday morning.

"The smell is horrific. You've got them bleeding in there, chundering in there, even crapping in there."

Few reliable statistics are available for alcohol crime, but Australian figures thought to be relevant to New Zealand show more than half of all arrests are liquor-related.

This suggests a large chunk of the police force's $1 billion annual budget is spent dealing with drunks, not counting other costs on the court and prison systems.

On a typical day police stop 68 drink-drivers and find 45 people so heavily boozed they have to be locked in detox. Those figures soar at New Year.

Mr Sowter said his staff were often still busy with one van-load of offenders when the next batch of 10 or so stumbled through the door.

The busiest time was from midnight until 4am.

"You work your arse off on those nights. Alcohol fuels violence and disorder in the city."

The relaxing of liquor laws in the past 20 years has increased the police workload at night. Streets that were once quiet by midnight now teem with people until 4am or later.

Figures show the lowering of the drinking age in 1999 added to the problem. Youths aged 16 and 17 now drink an average of eight cans of beer every time they hit the booze - up from five cans less than a decade ago.

Paul Marriott-Lloyd and Michael Webb, of the police, have spoken of teenage drinking causing a jump in disorder-type crime.

Land Transport Safety Authority spokesman Andy Knackstedt said alcohol played a part in 34 per cent of fatal road crashes this year - about 150 deaths.

Superintendent Steve Fitzgerald, the police national road safety manager, said officers placed a strong emphasis on catching drink-drivers at this time of year because of the temptation to booze over summer.

All 12 police districts now have "compulsory breath teams" - jargon for booze-bus crews.

This means there is effectively a permanent blitz in place.

Mr Fitzgerald said evidence showed the booze buses worked best when highly visible in cities and "covert" in rural areas.

Other social agencies deal with less-publicised fallout from the alcohol and crime cycle.

The executive director of the Domestic Violence Centre in Auckland, Jane Drumm, said her staff coped with a dozen new referrals a day - up to 5000 people a year.

Three years ago, she did a study of callouts and found that nearly one-third were alcohol-related.

"Alcohol does not cause violence, but it does reduce inhibitions in people who are predisposed to it, and it can make assaults more severe," she said.

The centre has 17 refuges in Auckland, with 18 paid staff, 25 contractors and 35 to 65 volunteers.

Jane Drumm said that even with those resources, the centre came under severe pressure after Christmas as relationships broke up.

"Certainly alcohol plays a heavy role in that."

Auckland's central-city police said they found domestic violence less of a problem because relatively few people lived in the area.

However, street crime drained resources.

Mr Sowter and his area controller, Inspector Brett England, said their little 10sq km central city patch held 11 per cent of the nation's licensed premises.

An increasing number of people arrested on weekend nights were high on drugs such as P, but the great majority were drunk.

"Liquor licensing has made a huge difference in the past 15 years," Mr Sowter said.

"We're getting 80 to 100 arrests a night, and the sheer volume snows you under."