A new policing method sweeping Canada and Britain may bring the term "nanny state" to a whole new level.
Police officers in Guelph, Edmonton and Victoria, among others, are finding a sweet new way to approach crowds of overly-merry revellers - they're handing out lollipops as a way of calming drunken bar patrons and preventing fights.
As one officer said of the so-called lollicops: "If we can find different ways to solve issues rather than through tickets or arrests, it's better."
The idea has its supporters - the owner of Sugar Mountain Confectionary Co. thinks it's a brilliant idea... granted he may have a slight bias.
It's true, a hand stretched out with candy rather than a baton is much less apt to rile people up, but there's something off about handing out wowwypops to adult human beings.
As one officer put it: "You put it in your mouth, you tend not to yell and hoot and holler."
Now doesn't that sound just like a soother? And a grown person's reaction to having a soother stuck in his mouth is to calm down? Really? Does he gurgle too?
This tactic just seems to encourage the infantilization of our society, which already sees "children" living in their parents' basements well into their 30s.
It panders to those who feel they should be rewarded just for acting grown up, as though behaving responsibly is a burden the world has unfairly foisted on them.
And what will this lead to? If police run out of lollipops one night, will that justify temper tantrums from volatile drunks feeling ripped off because they didn't get their bedtime treat?
Read any parenting book and they will tell you that bribing is a bad way to go. In the following paragraph, just replace "child" with "drunk" and you see the point.
"Bribing children is essentially rewarding them for something they haven't yet delivered. By buying into your child's bad behaviour, you are providing them with leverage for the next time they want something. At this point your child has your measure, and they know exactly the buttons to push that give them the results they want."
The fact is, members of our society have 18 years to learn that childish, anti-social, destructive behaviour will not be tolerated, and there are consequences to breaking the law.
Unfortunately, when enforcement personnel are outnumbered by boorish, over-grown brats refusing to behave within the boundaries of our social contract... well, the world becomes "solitary, poor, brutish, nasty and short," as Thomas Hobbes said (no, not the cartoon character, the other Hobbes).
But it may not be all grim - Kathryn Graham, a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in London, Ont., who has spent years studying bar violence, said if police are reporting positive effects from these candy experiments, it probably has less to do with the sugar rush and more to do with the police presence and their approach.
So perhaps we still do respect the authority of police officers (despite what happened during the Vancouver Canucks Stanley Cup riot).
We shouldn't undermine what remains of that authority by reducing cops to parental figures doling out candy bribes. Especially since that may very well be the same method that led to the spoiled attitude of drunken louts to begin with.
-- Prince George Citizen
