the campaign seems to have died the death

Ban and gone -how "tough" has turned tepid!

Is it the case that the spirit has gone out of the campaign to reduce drinking on Boston’s streets and in public areas?
It would seem so – given the borough council’s recent joint clarification with Lincolnshire Police of the “confusion” over the town’s Designated Public Place Order.
The council tells us that DPPOs are sometimes “inaccurately” referred to as drinks bans – but that this is not the case.
“It gives only the police the power to confiscate alcohol if its consumption is associated with anti-social behaviour, or is likely to lead to anti-social behaviour.
“So, a family picnicking in Central Park and enjoying a bottle of wine on a sunny Sunday is perfectly acceptable. Someone supping super-strength lager from a can and using foul and abusive language, louting around in the children’s play area or ripping out flowers to throw at one another would be obvious instances where, under the DPPO, police could confiscate their alcohol, pour it away and, if deemed necessary, require them to leave the DPPO area.
“A group of people, peacefully drinking alcohol on a public bench, is not an offence and not an activity the police can take action over.”
What this boils down to is an admission by the police that the DPPO is unforceable, and by the council that for all the hot air spouted when the order was introduced was nothing more than cheap window dressing to soothe the hoi polloi’s concerns about an insoluble problem.
Back in September 2007 when all this was first mooted, the Boston Standard reported that the police had pledged to adopt a 'zero tolerance' approach towards people drinking alcohol in Boston's streets and parks
Co-incidentally, the idea of the family picnic was raised back then – by former Councillor Graham Dovey, who was vice-chairman of the policy development committee which discussed the issue.
“What about sitting in the sun with your wife and children in the park, with a bottle of champagne?” Councillor Dovey was reported to have asked Boston police Sergeant Mick Cordwell. “You can’t have zero tolerance, surely?”
The account of the meeting says that Sergeant Cordwell, was unequivocal. “It has to be zero tolerance,” he said. “I think it’s the only way you can do it.”
The “b” word kept on cropping up in line after line of reports.
A council community safety officer was quoted as saying: “In other areas where a ban has been introduced it seems if you get it right in the first few weeks it almost polices itself.”
A request to extend the DPPO by residents of Witham Bank was rejected, but again the same officer was reported as saying that if the scheme was a success, the alcohol-free area could be extended.
A couple of months later, the Standard reported “Boozing in Boston's town centre streets will be outlawed from Friday.
“Anyone caught in breach of the ban – officially known as a Designated Public Place Order – faces arrest if they refuse to co-operate with police.”
Along with the repeated use of the word “ban” came almost £7,000 in funding to support its implementation – described as extra funds from regional level to pay for a high-profile ‘blitz’ on street drinking in the first weeks after a ban is implemented.
Of this, £4,000 was reportedly being spent on extra police officers and police community support officers “to clamp down on the ban in its first few weeks,” £1,500 on “education” prior to the “ban”, and £1,400 towards signs and publicity advertising the “ban.”
How strange that not once during this frenzy of reporting of the borough council’s apparent embrace of localised prohibition, no one bothered to correct the mistaken idea that the DPPO was anything other than a ban.
What the latest definition appears to mean is that groups of people sitting on park benches or seats beside the town’s waterways downing their tins of strong lager are perfectly acceptable unless they start to tiptoe through the tulips or decide to wear some flowers in their hair.
This is despite the fact that many people find such gatherings intimidating.
What it boils down to is that neither the police nor the council can manage the situation- so they have merely rewritten their own rules to allow them to ignore the bulk of complaints.
The council and the police are not the only people to throw in the towel over this issue, however.
A campaign to ban street drinking is one of the few items of “news” reported on Tory County Councillor Andrea Jenkyns’s website in the past two years or so.
And it trumpeted a campaign to extend the DPPO to the whole of the borough and publicised a website called banstreetbooze.com - launched in her local Boston North West ward, by a group calling themselves Boston North West Action Group.
In the meantime, the group set up a website, which cannot now be accessed, and a blog page – which has lain fallow since the welcoming message of January last year - whilst the domain name banstreetbooze.com was listed as being dropped on 25th May this year, and the website no longer exists.
When it comes to the issues that concern the public, there is one thing you can be sure of.
If at all possible, our so-called “leadership” will do its best to dodge the issue.

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