Award for Cardiff University's work on reducing drink-related crime

A partnership between university researchers and police in Cardiff to reduce alcohol-related violence has been given the Queen's Anniversary Award.

The team's approach, ranging from looking at pub opening hours, bar design to the use of plastic glasses, has already been adopted by other cities. Those behind the project say the amount of drunken crime in the city has been cut by 20% in seven years.

The project run by the university's violence and society research group has involved South Wales Police, the NHS, the council and Cardiff licensees. They share information and predict trends. Professor Jonathan Shepherd founded the team in 1996, after noticing trends emerging in the types of facial injuries he was treating as a surgeon at the capital's University Hospital of Wales (UHW).

He started to realise  that even though he was continually seeing the same injuries, they weren't routinely being reported to the police, and so there weren't any trends being correlated, or solutions proposed. The immediate and obvious solution, which had an instantaneous benefit, was to put pressure on clubs and city centre pubs open late to adopt plastic glasses or one's made from toughened glass.

 Professor Shepherd's work brought about an immediate decline in facial injuries connected to alcohol. The biggest drop came in Hull, where after adopting Cardiff's model, glassing injuries fell from 55 in 1998 to none at all in 1999.

The project partners also worked with licensees to re-design pubs with more space and seating, in an attempt to avoid the flash-points of being jostled, having your drink spilled, or being burned with a cigarette. But the key breakthrough came when the police, council and licensees agreed to pool information to chart where and how trouble had started before, and therefore predict it in the future.

Currently the violence and society research group is focusing its attention on looking beyond the night out, to the factors which make people more likely to become involved in alcohol-related crime before they even leave the house. In conjunction with the universities of Leicester and Bradford, they are part of a study into the role of drink in hate crimes, as well as extrapolating useable information from the social demographics of the victims of drunken violence.

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