Evaluated approaches to preventing violence related to drinking in licensed premises

Capone’s Law. You can get a lot more done with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone. (Rawson 2002: 45)

‘It should be a working together thing’. (Licensee in the Wellington enforcement experiment – Sim, Morgan and Batchelor 2005: 51)

There are all sorts of efforts being made around the world to reduce violence related to drinking establishments. These include such diverse approaches as government regulation of licensing hours (Duailibi et al. 2007; Plant and Plant 2005), hospitality industrydriven community partnerships in entertainment zones (Responsible Hospitality Institute 2006), encouraging safer practices with schemes such as the ‘best bar none’ award sponsored by the Home Office in the UK (https://www.crimereduction.gov.uk/tvcp/tvcp03.htm), and licensing and regulation of security staff (Lister et al. 2001; Prenzler and Hayes 1998). Most of these efforts have not been formally documented, fewer still have been evaluated and only a handful have been evaluated with sufficient rigour to draw conclusions about effectiveness. In this chapter, we focus on the minority that have been subjected to at least minimal outcome evaluation.