Place drunk people in 'drunk tanks', say police chiefs

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/sep/18/police-drunk-tank-initiative

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Drunks picked up by the police should be put in a privately run "drunk tank" to sleep it off and handed a bill for their overnight stay in the morning, police chiefs have said.

Adrian Lee, the Northamptonshire chief constable and national policing lead on alcohol harm, said the move would enable better use of police time and resources than allowing drinkers to sleep it off in a police cell.

Launching a campaign by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) to highlight alcohol harm, Lee said the police should no longer be responsible for the increasing number of late-night revellers who required medical treatment because they had drunk too much.

"I don't see why the police service or the health service should pick up the duty of care for someone who has chosen to go out and get so drunk that they cannot look after themselves," said Lee.

"So why don't we take them to a drunk cell owned by a commercial company and get the commercial company to look after them during the night until they are sober?

"When that is over, we will issue them with a fixed penalty and the company will be able to charge them for their care, which would be at a quite significant cost, and that might be a significant deterrent."

The chief constable is not the first to moot the idea of privately run drunk tanks. It was floated last year by David Cameron and more recently taken up by the Conservative police and crime commissioner for Humberside, Matthew Grove, who said it would conserve the police services' finite resources.

"One day we're probably going to have someone dying of a heart attack on the side of the road because we're dealing with a drunk. Public services are a finite resource and we need to appreciate that," he said.

The idea was criticised at the time as a risky gimmick by the Police Federation, which said locking very drunk people who probably needed medical attention in a confined space was not an effective solution.

But Lee said the police were not health experts. "It is quite difficult to work out where the best place to put a drunk is. Is it the police station, or do they need a hospital? Why should we have drunks clogging up A&E, causing further problems potentially? Why not put them somewhere safe where you could have private medical staff on hand?"

The idea was endorsed by Sir Hugh Orde, the Acpo president, who said inebriated people were high-risk and needed to be checked every 15 to 30 minutes. They were a huge cost in staff time "and when one of these people tragically dies, the service is quite rightly criticised".

The week-long campaign will see police on the streets with mobile custody suites and medical triage facilities to deal with the drunk and disorderly.

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