In regard to Jimmy’s post yesterday I have a few more comments.
Save My Sunday, my new whipping post, has a lot to say regarding whether Walgreens should be granted the retailer liquor license they have applied for which would allow them to sell liquor in most of their 53 central Indiana stores and 200 statewide. As a group that nominally opposes liquor sales on Sunday but clearly wishes to abolish liquor sales altogether, they are of the mind that Walgreens’s application should be denied.
Their logic is that an increase in liquor outlets, by making alcohol more easily obtainable, will increase drunkeness and the problems associated with it. They have been saying this for awhile now, but earlier this week two Indiana University professors helped them out by putting some science behind the theory.
According to Criminal Justice professor William Alex Pridemore and Department of Geography professor Tony Grubesic, in a briefing presented as part of the Feb. 18-22 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego, California and in a press briefing on February 22, an additional off-premise liquor outlet in a square mile block is associated with an additional 2.3 simple assaults per year. An additional restaurant is associated with 1.15 additional simple assaults and a bar with 1.35 additional assaults.
Now statistics are statistics, and I’m not here to deny that these two professors are fine collectors and analysts of data. I’m sure they are. But statistics don’t show or prove causation. Causation must be theorized from the available data and then tested. All this study can prove is that there is a relationship between crime and liquor outlet density. That relationship does not have to be causal. But Pridemore and Grubesic, according to this summary of the paper, seem to believe that the liquor stores do more than serve as a marker of high crime areas and in fact claim,
We could expect a reduction of about one-quarter in simple assaults and nearly one-third in aggravated assaults in our sample of Cincinnati block groups were alcohol outlets removed entirely.
The causative mechanism according to the authors is
A higher density of alcohol sales outlets in an area means closer proximity and easier availability to an intoxicating substance for residents,” Pridemore said. “Perhaps just as importantly, alcohol outlets provide a greater number of potentially deviant places. Convenience stores licensed to sell alcohol may be especially troublesome in this regard, as they often serve not only as sources of alcohol but also as local gathering places with little formal social control. [emphasis mine]
This seems pretty flimsy to me from an economic standpoint. Even on the Saturday night before the Super Bowl, package liquor stores are always well stocked. So in terms of available liquor, we live in a world where our physical supply routinely outpaces our consumption. If you added a liquor store across the street from another outlet, you have not made booze any more convenient or cheap and you have barely altered the landscape in regard to proximity of sale. It is true, as the author’s suggest, that you do create an additional space where people that desire alcohol will run into each other, “potential deviant places” which is something I will come back to. And keep in mind, the professors were talking about blocks of one square mile, a perimeter so vast it can be walked in an hour.
It seems to me that a higher density of liquor stores are not the cause of higher incidents of assaults, but rather architectural signals of, well, not to put too fine a point on it, worse sides of town. That is, retail outlets don’t spring up haphazardly; they go where the demand is. Put another way, a high liquor store density tells you that you are in a high crime area, not that liquor is the cause of that crime, which renders the authors’ supposed reduction in crime from reducing the amount of granted liquor licenses absurd. No one remembers Prohibition as being a low crime moment in America’s history. That experiment has already been run.
Without seeing the presentation myself I can’t know for sure if the authors accounted for the notion that an additional liquor store in a bad neighborhood was also an additional target of a robbery. That is, 2.3 additional assaults per yer isn’t that big of an increase. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that if we were to obtain the raw data and remove from the population all burglaries/robberies of liquor stores that the effect would be reduced to near zero. (Note: the summary of the paper linked here doesn’t say “per year.” It just says 2.3 additional assaults. Without a time paramter that statement doesn’t make any sense. I could be drastically underestimating the increase in assaults here and will correct it when and if I find a reason to.)
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume the authors are correct, that by reducing the amount of licenses one can actually reduce crime, does it follow that the correct course of action is to deny Walgreens their license?
I would argue that it does not. As Jimmy pointed out yesterday, this would be a governmental action that is discriminatory against Walgreens specifically and cannot be supported by law. CVS, Kroger, Meijer, and several other outlets all already sell liquor and Walgreens is at least as responsible as any of them, probably more so given CVS’s ethical problems of the last decade. And why would you want to keep Walgreens out of the game? All this will do will transfer some of CVS’s, Kroger’s, and Meijer’s profits over to Walgreens. That’s why they’re so up in arms over Walgreen’s return to the liquor game.
Rather the proper response, if the authors are correct, would be to simply reduce the amount of licenses allowed and let Walgreens obtain a license wherever one was available. Which presumably is what John Livengood would agree to since, by his reading of current Indiana law, there are already too many licenses issued and so Walgreens would be SOL. I don’t know if he’s right or not, but as Jimmy mentioned yesterday and as the Star reported, at least one judge thinks he’s wrong.
And speaking of Mr. Livengood, he cracks me up. If you were to read this line from him, “A corporation that once said it would never sell alcohol is now essentially turning its once family-friendly drugstores into liquor stores,” [emphasis mine]wouldn’t you suppose he was one of Save My Sunday’s bloggers? Wouldn’t you think he was a neo-Prohibitionist of some sort, full of loathing for those despicable outlets that profiteer off man’s vices?
Well guess what! He’s the CEO of the Indiana Association of Beverage Retailers, and by “beverage” they mean alcoholic beverages. He has his dog in the fight, sure, but trying to appeal to our emotional sense to convince us that the only acceptable place to buy liquor is a liquor store, just seems in bad form. I quickly add, though, that I do think the best place to buy liquor is a liquor store. People who follow liquor trends and talk directly to liquor consumers can impart a wealth of knowledge to the curious shopper. CVS employees, as nice as they are often are, just aren’t very helpful when you need to know which box wine goes best with chicken breast baked in cream of mushroom soup. (Pssst, I’d go with the Target brand Wine Cube California Chardonnay.)