Effects of restricting pub closing times on night‐time assaults in an Australian city

Kypros Kypri · Patrick McElduff · Daniel Barker

161 citations0/0 files storedAddiction

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Night-time city culture Substance Abuse Treatment and Outcomes Crime Patterns and Interventions

Abstract

AIMS: In March 2008 the New South Wales judiciary restricted pub closing times to 3 a.m., and later 3.30 a.m., in the central business district (CBD) of Newcastle, Australia. We sought to determine whether the restriction reduced the incidence of assault. DESIGN: Non-equivalent control group design with before and after observations. SETTING: Newcastle, a city of 530,000 people. PARTICIPANTS: People apprehended for assault in the CBD and nearby Hamilton, an area with a similar night-time economy but where no restriction was imposed. MEASUREMENTS: Police-recorded assaults in the CBD before and after the restriction were compared with those in Hamilton. Cases were assaults occurring from 10 p.m.-6 a.m. from January 2001-March 2008, with April 2008-September 2009 as the post-restriction period. We also examined changes in assault incidence by time of night. Negative binomial regression with time, area, time × area interaction terms and terms for secular trend and seasonal effects was used to analyse the data. Autocorrelation was examined using generalized estimating equations. FINDINGS: In the CBD, recorded assaults fell from 99.0 per quarter before the restriction to 67.7 per quarter afterward [incidence rate ratio (IRR): 0.66, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.55-0.80]. In the same periods in Hamilton, assault rates were 23.4 and 25.5 per quarter, respectively (IRR: 1.02, 95% CI: 0.79-1.31). The relative reduction attributable to the intervention was 37% (IRR = 0.63, 95% CI: 0.47-0.81) and approximately 33 assault incidents were prevented per quarter. CONCLUSION: This study indicates that a restriction in pub closing times to 3/3.30 a.m. in Newcastle, NSW, produced a large relative reduction in assault incidence of 37% in comparison to a control locality.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 161 citations exist upstream.

References

1963Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research 2003Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity. Research and public policy 2003Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity 1992Public Drinking and Violence: Not Just an Alcohol Problem

Cited by

2011The impact of small changes in bar closing hours on violence. The Norwegian experience from 18 cities 2012The pedagogy of regret: Facebook, binge drinking and young women 2013Recommendations for International Gambling Harm-Minimisation Guidelines: Comparison with Effective Public Health Policy 2014Restrictions in pub closing times and lockouts in Newcastle, A ustralia five years on 2019Capturing violence in the night-time economy: A review of established and emerging methodologies 2017Queensland Alcohol-related violence and Night Time Economy Monitoring project (QUANTEM): a study protocol 2016Alcohol: taking a population perspective 2014Changes in injury‐related hospital emergency department presentations associated with the imposition of regulatory versus voluntary licensing conditions on licensed venues in two cities

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.