Place managers in entertainment districts: the role of third party policing in shaping place manager actions

Abstract

The police play an important role in the control of drug and alcohol problems in entertainment districts. Their role, however, in partnership approaches to crime control in entertainment districts is not well understood. In this paper, we explore how a police-led partnership (the Liquor Enforcement and Proactive Strategies programme – LEAPS) shaped licensed venue managers' and owners' (whom we refer to as ‘place managers’) perceptions of crime and disorder and how LEAPS then activates place managers to take some responsibility for controlling crime and disorder problems. Using a survey of the population of place managers in an entertainment district in Brisbane, Australia before and after the implementation of LEAPS, our study reveals that place managers perceived a decrease in drug use, prostitution and chroming, yet perceptions of the incidence of underage drinking, social disorder and fighting increased. Results also show an increase in the number of self-reported proactive behaviours taken by place managers who considered illicit and licit drugs to be a problem. Results suggest that the role of place managers is instrumental for enhancing police responses to drug and alcohol problems in entertainment districts. We conclude that LEAPS officers are well placed to co-opt place managers into taking further responsibility for crime problems in and around their drinking establishments.

Keywords:

• problem-oriented and partnership policing
• third party policing
• Liquor Enforcement and Proactive Strategies (LEAPS)
• place managers
• entertainment districts

Notes

1. In this paper, we define chroming in line with definitions of VSM. VSM is defined as ‘as the deliberate inhalation of a gas or fumes released from a substance at room temperature’ (Crime and Misconduct Commission 2005).

2. LIAG visits were described as ‘low impact enforcement’, as they do not usually impede the operations of the venue, and the LIAG representatives (including police) are dressed casually (Interview A, 2007). While the representatives endeavour to use low impact enforcement, venues have been temporarily closed or their business restricted due to serious safety concerns.

3. We acknowledge that the population of place managers of pubs and clubs in this study is small and may not necessarily represent the views of place managers of pubs and clubs elsewhere. However, our approach includes an examination of the views of the entire population of place managers of pubs and clubs in the study location over time, and thus avoids the limitations which often exist in drawing a sample from a population.

4. We expect that the bias is small given that there was minimal change with respect to place managers across the collection periods T1–T2.

5. Please note that the same measures were used across both waves of data collection.

6. We acknowledge the limitations of using PCA in the current analysis with a small sample. However our purpose in employing PCA analysis was to examine whether the data under consideration are correlated. Further, we wanted assurance that the factors constructed using PCA had the following statistical characteristics: (1) each factor accounted for as much variation in the underlying data as possible; (2) each factor is uncorrelated with every other factor; and (3) that the principal components elucidate the dominant combinations of variables within the covariance structure of the data. While we recognise that PCA is usually not recommended for samples below 100, in this case we have the population, rather than a sample, and the inter-item correlations and KMO statistics are acceptable.

7. All PCAs were estimated using the Varimax rotation and suppressing coefficients below.

8. Note that while Mazerolle et al. (1998) used two scales – collective positive action and individual positive action – some of the measures taken for collective action in the 1998 study were not relevant in the current context, and so were dropped from the survey. Furthermore, correlations between the positive and collective action items revealed significant associations (indeed, some exhibited multicollinearity and thus were excluded). Their concurrency is indicative of the same process or internal motivation. For these two reasons, one holistic measure of ‘positive action’ was created in the current study.

9. This item simply refers to some other action that does not fit into one of the categories presented in Figure 3 such as confronting buyers/dealers/criminals.