In the United States, Baltimore, Maryland has long held the unfortunate distinction of being one of the cities with the highest violent crime rates. When one Baltimore neighborhood experienced a persistently high burden of homicides and assaults, legislators tried an often-overlooked strategy: Reducing the hours that bars/taverns could sell alcohol.
What was Senate Bill 571?
In Baltimore, bars/taverns may sell alcohol for both on- and off-site consumption. Consequently, they contain the risk profiles of both on- and off-premise alcohol outlets. By selling for off-site consumption, bar/taverns may contribute to higher levels of population-level consumption via lower prices than those customers typically pay when drinking on-site. By selling for on-site consumption, bar/taverns may bring intoxicated people together in ways that cause violence to spark. Limiting bar/taverns’ late-night hours would then reduce the amount of time customers can drink on-site, potentially reducing the levels of intoxication that drinkers reach.
Prior to Senate Bill 571 (SB571), bar/taverns in the affected neighborhood (“bill catchment area”) could sell alcohol from 6 AM to 2 AM – 20 hours per day. After SB571 went into effect on 1 July 2020, these establishments were open 7 fewer hours, from 9 AM to 10 PM. The bill catchment area was approximately 1 square mile (2.6 square kilometers), covering 1% of Baltimore’s land.
What did we do?
We evaluated SB571’s effect on four types of violence – homicide, assault, rape, and robbery – over time and relative to two control neighborhoods where SB571 was not implemented. Specifically, we examined changes in late-night (8 PM-4 AM) violent crimes, as violence is more common during these hours and violence is more likely to be related to alcohol late at night. We tested whether the level of violence within 800 feet of bars/taverns changed after SB571’s implementation. Limiting our investigation to violence in the immediate vicinity of the bar/taverns avoided counting violent incidents likely unrelated to the bar/taverns and their hours.
What did we find?
In the first month after implementation, SB571 cut all violent crimes by 14% in the bill catchment area. Additionally, the level of all violent crimes fell 29% faster per year in the bill catchment area than in the control neighborhoods after the first month. While there were no significant immediate changes in homicides and assaults after implementation, these crimes dropped by 48% and 31%, respectively, over the first year as compared to the control neighborhoods. We found that these results were also consistent, regardless of our modeling choices. Namely, violent crime did not just shift to occur earlier in the day or move further away from the bars/taverns. These changes could accumulate into meaningful impacts for communities, as the 14% immediate reduction and 29% annual decrease in violence translated to 113 fewer violent crimes and USD$12.5 million saved in the first year.
Why does this matter?
This study is among the first to evaluate a substantial reduction in the hours of alcohol sales. There have been four systematic reviews on the effectiveness of hours of sales restrictions, conducted in 2009, 2010, 2015, and 2018. This large literature consistently concludes that allowing alcohol outlets to sell for more hours is associated with greater levels of consumption and harm. Our study contributes to a small, but growing, literature that finds the reverse is also true: Limiting alcohol hours of sale is associated with fewer harms.
From a practical perspective, alcohol prevention and violence prevention often occur in silos. Our study showed that policies such as SB571 can achieve alcohol and violence prevention goals simultaneously. While we did not measure alcohol consumption directly, it is likely that the reductions in violence that we found, at least in part, resulted from people drinking less. While this may mean that SB571 had an unintended benefit of reducing consumption and, possibly, other alcohol-related harms, we are eager to better understand these mechanisms as the number of these evaluations continues to grow. Finally, using alcohol policy to curb violence does not rely on criminal deterrents or punishment, which contributed to racial injustice in the United States and abroad. Instead, SB571 made the environment less conducive to violence.
Written by Dr Erika Rosen and Dr Pamela Trangenstein, Alcohol Research Group, Public Health Institute, USA.
All IAS Blogposts are published with the permission of the author. The views expressed are solely the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Institute of Alcohol Studies.