After many, many Friday and Saturday nights on the beat in Wellington Central, police officer Senior Sergeant Mark Buttar has noticed a rise in pre-loading before a night on the town amongst twenty-somethings. He says he’s not out to stop people from having a good time, but of primary concern to police is people over-indulging in alcohol and putting themselves in harm’s way.
Most of the time, when trains pull into Wellington Railway Station in the small hours of Saturday or Sunday morning, police officers are waiting on the platform to meet them.
Police take into account waves of people coming into town on the weekend, and there tends to be a surge after midnight as people arrive by train in the central city from Upper and Lower Hutt, Waikanae and Porirua, where the bars close earlier.
“It’s not uncommon for us to stop quite a large number of people getting off those trains with backpacks containing boxes of RTDs or bottles of vodka,” says Wellington Police District spokesman Senior Sergeant Mark Buttar. “We have staff turn up at the railway station at those times – it’s become a bit of a pattern for us – and then, as the night goes on, from about 1am, we have an increased presence in that Courtenay Place area.”
Senior Sergeant Mark Buttar of Wellington Police District Photo: Diego Opatowski / RNZ
Possessing alcohol to drink in any public place within the central city is prohibited at all times, and enforcing that liquor ban takes up a great deal of police time and resources, just about every weekend.
“There’s really no excuse; just about every city and town has a liquor ban in place, so people coming in should be aware,” says Buttar. “The age-old excuse of ‘I didn’t know there’s a liquor ban in Wellington city’ isn’t going to cut the mustard as much these days.”
It will only take us a few minutes to dish out a ticket to someone who’s being an idiot … and it’s going to sting them $250 there and then
Until relatively recently, police officers could choose between taking offenders to court for breaching the ban, or tipping out the vessel and letting them off with a warning. “There’s been no middle group – it’s either prepare a file for court and charge them and lock them up, or warn them.”
But new liquor laws that came into effect last month give police the option of handing down an instant fine for breaches of the liquor ban, under-age drinking or bad behaviour. “It will only take us a few minutes to dish out a ticket to someone who’s being an idiot … and it’s going to sting them $250 there and then,” says Buttar. “It’s more efficient for us in terms of dealing with people who are beaching the liquor ban but we’ll still use discretion.
“In the past, we might not have been able to spare the time to arrest someone, go back and get the file ready for court. Now we can just deal with them in five minutes.”
Police aren’t out to stop people from having a good time, Buttar’s quick to point out, but of primary concern is the fact that people who drink too much put themselves at increased risk of harm. In the worst-case scenario, someone might fall into water, or off a balcony.
People who have had too much to drink also present as an “easy target for some of those… pieces of society, shall we say” that might be looking for someone to rob or assault, he explains.
“They’re not making decent decisions, they’re straying from their mates, becoming more vulnerable. That’s our biggest concern – the more booze that people have, the more that they get fuelled up, the more they increase their chances of being a victim.”
On the flipside, people who have had too much to drink are also at greater risk of offending. Research carried out by the Wellington City Council and police has found that alcohol is a factor in the majority of arrests made for disorder, violence and sexual offending in the city.
If you’re sober, you’re not going to smash someone’s letterbox, or break a window, or empty out a rubbish bin. You just don’t do that when you’re sober
“If you’re sober, you’re not going to smash someone’s letterbox, or break a window, or empty out a rubbish bin,” says Buttar. “You just don’t do that when you’re sober. Too much of it [alcohol] is going to increase their chances of becoming a victim, or an offender. They don’t want that, because they’ll wake up the next morning regretting what they’ve done, or what happened to them.”
One of the problems is the culture of pre-loading (“That’s the term that everyone is familiar with,” says Buttar, with the clinical interest of a modern-day anthropologist), which he sees as a relatively recent phenomenon.
“There does seem to be a bigger culture, these days, of young people in particular pre-loading … You do tend to see a lot more people arriving in the central city having already had a number of drinks, just about every Friday and Saturday night.”
Partly it’s the changing face of Wellington – more high-rise apartment blocks in town mean more people living in the centre of town – but it can also be chalked up to the price of alcohol. You don’t have to be of legal drinking age to know that standard drinks are cheaper at the supermarket or bottle store.
But does that mean the problem go away if drinks were cheaper in bars?
Buttar sighs. “It’s difficult to say… I guess, logically, you’d suggest that perhaps it would – because if people are paying seven or eight bucks for a beer in a pub, we all know how many you can get from a bottle store for that sort of price. It’s a lot of younger people, too, from 18 to their early 20s, where money is perhaps a bit tighter and they’re after more bang for their buck.”
That age group, from about 20 to 30, are also more likely to be the perpetrators – or victims – of alcohol-related bad behaviour than others, he says. “Even from 18 onwards. It’s that excitement, I suppose, of ‘We can go out there and drink lawfully’. But some grow up a bit later than others.”
It’s to some extent a cultural issue, rather than a legislative one, but the new liquor laws are a sign of commitment to change. “Part of the sad fact is our teenagers get some sort of modelling from their parents; you can’t change it overnight,” he says. “It might take a whole generation to change the way we do use alcohol, but it has to start somewhere, and this is what this new law is about.”
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