Also look at the power structure – rather than addressing whether some behaviour can be prevented and at what cost to all involved there’s often an implicit acknowledgement that it will always occur and the “solution” displaces the cost of it onto a group that doesn’t matter to the people making the decisions.

In this case, rather than trying to address the problem of young people hanging around in groups making their elders feel uncomfortable[1] the decision is to keep pushing them out of areas until they arrive on the doorstep of someone who can’t push them away. Especially the case where I live and there are young people from a well off area who have strong sense of entitlement and few scruples when they don’t get their own way. A popular solution in the area is to encourage the kids to go somewhere else for weekends, and especially for parties. So the parents fund the hire of a warehouse, or purchase a “holiday house” in a cheap coastal area, and the kids go there to be young and stupid. Problem solved!

In that sense Corey Worthington is partly the exception, and partly the obvious consequence – he’s used to parties being like that, he’s been trained to regard them as normal fun, so when the enforcement of the “not at home” rule is relaxed… bingo!

[1] the problem here often being as much the intolerance of the elders as the behaviour of the youth.

I guess it comes down to how much collateral damage one is willing to accept from policy. I definitely accept some – people are sometimes wrongly convicted of crimes, but I think the balance between type I and type II errors in the justice system is about right, for example. More generally, it’s about how we weigh the rights of the individual against the welfare of others: not an easy problem to argue rationally about.

Do I think that targeting drinking in an area where there is a lot of drunken violence makes sense? Definitely. If we could tell who was going to be a problem then that would be excellent; however, in the absence of that information, a policy targeting all drinking in public may have a net benefit.