A councillor has called for a summit to tackle ‘excessive drunken behaviour’ in York city centre.
The Green Party’s Denise Craghill, who represents Guildhall ward, has written to City of York Council leaders calling for action.
It follows concerns about drunken behaviour this weekend. This included a man on his stag do who was seen “urinating in the middle of York in full view of families” on Saturday afternoon (June 30).
Police threw him out of the city for his “blatant offensive behaviour”.
Time to draw the line
Perhaps as a city we should be coming together to say, that whilst we want people to come to York and enjoy themselves, we draw the line at a situation where people are getting excessively drunk and disruptive by early afternoon and going on from there.
There will be no single solution to this but we should be considering everything from awareness campaigns to enforcement.
She wants “all the relevant parties including the Council, the BID, Make it York, York Retail Forum and other traders’ organisations, the police, city centre councillors and the Racecourse to be brought together to look at what additional actions can be taken on this”.
Six arrests
Saturday saw a number of big events in York. More than 40,000 people were at York races, it was Armed Forces Day, the World Cup was being shown live in many bars, and the good weather had attracted many visitors.
Inspector Andy Godfrey, Neighbourhood Policing Inspector for York city centre, told Minster FM:
Despite the very high volume of people, the reality is that there were only 44 reports to the police regarding city centre issues between 11am on Saturday and 6am on Sunday.
Of these, eight can be attributed to alcohol or the night time economy, which led to six people being arrested and two dispersal orders being issued.
We regularly work with City of York Council and North Yorkshire Police licensing to carry out licensing checks with regards to selling alcohol to drunk patrons.
We have not found any offences whilst taking this action.