By: John E. Eck & Emily B. Eck

On May 16, 2010, in the Club Ritz nightclub, Jerry Scott shot Dexter Burroughs dead. This was the second killing in the bar since 1998. Five years earlier, four people were shot near the club, one by the police and three in a separate incident. Four years earlier, a fight at the club resulted in a car chase that killed Philiant Johnson and wounded three others. On Valentine’s Day 2010, three people were shot in the club’s parking lot (Baker, 2010; Horst, 2010). After the killing of Burroughs, the club closed for several months but then reopened. Police state that since reopening, “14 arrests for disorderly conduct or drug possession have been made at the club, plus 10 assaults, four domestic violence incidents, a robbery and carjacking” (Whitaker, 2011). The owner of the club stated: “It’s not our fault. Nightclubs do not kill people. People kill people” (Nightclub and Bar, 2010). Just as the owner of the Club Ritz implies they should, current crime policies focus exclusively on offenders. We suggest he is wrong—crime reduction policies also should focus on places. Research has established that crime is concentrated at places; yet to date, policy makers and criminologists have focused most of their attention on two policy prescriptions: use coercion to deter or remove offenders, use forms of social assistance to divert potential offenders from crime, or convince active offenders to pursue legitimate activities (Weisburd, Telep, and Braga, 2010).

Criminology & Public Policy Volume 11 Issue 2

By Jonathan P. Caulkins, Kristina Vaia Reimer

Background: Nations wrestle with whether to prohibit products that can harm consumers and third parties but whose prohibition creates illegal markets. For example, cannabis is banned in most of the world, but supply for non-medical use has been legalized in Uruguay, Canada, and much of the United States and possession restrictions have been liberalized in other countries. Likewise, supply and possession of fireworks have been subject to varying degrees of prohibition in multiple countries, with those bans prompting significant evasion. Methods: Current and past history of fireworks regulations, sales, and harms are reviewed and contrasted with those for cannabis. The focus is on the United States, but literature from other countries is incorporated when possible and appropriate. This extends the insightful literature comparing drugs to other vices (such as gambling and prostitution) by comparing a drug to a risky pleasure that is not seen as a vice but which has been subject to prohibition. Results: There are many parallels between fireworks and cannabis in legal approaches, harms to “users”, harms to others, and other externalities. In the U.S. the timing of prohibitions were similar, with prohibitions on fireworks being imposed a little later and repealed a little sooner. Internationally, the countries that are strictest with fireworks are not always those that are strictest with drugs. By some measures, harms are of roughly similar magnitude. During the last years of U.S. cannabis prohibition, there were about 10 emergency department (ED) events per million dollars spent on both fireworks and illegal cannabis, but fireworks generated very roughly three times as many ED events per hour of use/enjoyment. There are also differences, e.g., punishments were less harsh for violating fireworks prohibitions, fireworks consumption is heavily concentrated in just a few days or weeks per year, and illegal distribution is primarily of diverted legal products, not of illegally produced materials. Conclusions: The absence of hysteria over fireworks problems and policies suggests that societies can address complex tradeoffs involving risky pleasures without excessive acrimony or divisiveness when that product or activity is not construed as a vice. However, the conflicted and time-varying history of fireworks bans also show that difficulty balancing freedoms and pleasure with harms to users and others is not restricted to drugs or other vices. Use-related harms fell when fireworks were banned and rose when those bans were repealed, so fireworks prohibitions can be seen as “working” from a public health perspective, but not well enough for bans to be employed in all times or places

International Journal of Drug Policy. Volume 118, August 2023,

By Scott Jacques.

“My first trip to Amsterdam was for a couple of days in the autumn of 2003. A second-year student at the University of Georgia, I was studying abroad at Oxford, just a few hours by air from Amsterdam. Years before, I had learned how to smoke marijuana and enjoy its effects, probably too much so. For stoners like my former self, visiting Amsterdam’s coffeeshops is a recreational pilgrimage. There a smoker can purchase cannabis and get high without fear of legal trouble, despite it being an illegal activity. This was a welcome change from the accustomed stress of acquiring weed in the United States.

UCL press. (2019) 186p.

By Geoff Pearson and Mike Rowe.

Police Street Powers and Criminal Justice analyses the utilisation, regulation and legitimacy of police powers. Drawing upon six-years of ethnographic research in two police forces in England, this book uncovers the importance of time and place, supervision and monitoring, local policies and law. Covering a period when the police were under intense scrutiny and subject to austerity measures, the authors contend that the concept of police culture does not help us understand police discretion. They argue that change is a dominant feature of policing and identify fragmented responses to law and policy reform, varying between police stations, across different policing roles, and between senior and frontline ranks.

Hart Publishing (2020) 243 pages.