Take two similar places, and the one with more “alcohol outlets” tends to be more violent. Now two researchers from the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, California, (one of 15 sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism) have found that if you watch the same places over time, the same result appears–at least in 581 California zip codes.
Paul Gruenwald and Lillian Remer write, “Assault rates were most strongly related to median household incomes and minority populations within zip code areas.” But once they factored that out, “ten-percent increases in numbers of off-premise outlets and bars were related to 1.67 and 2.06 percent increases in violence rates across local and lagged [bordering] spatial areas. Every six outlets accounted for one additional violent assault that resulted in at least one overnight stay at hospital.”
And as if you didn’t already know who was mixing it up, “These effects increased with larger male populations, doubling with every three-percent increase in percent males.”
You have to pay for the article, but the abstract is free here.