Officer Conan Schafer has recently taken over responsibility for overseeing liquor license investigation and enforcement at the Lincoln Police Department, and liaison with licensees and the City Council on such matters. He has been working on the police department’s liquor license database, bringing everything up to date. I asked him to straighten up the addresses a little bit during this process, to try to get them into a consistent format so they will geocode more easily.
A few times a year, I need a geographic layer of liquor licenses for one reason or another–most recently to provide this information to HunchLab for their predictive algorithm. I usually have to spend some significant time cleaning up the addresses before geocoding, but this time it was a snap. Here’s a map of the 481 liquor licenses in Lincoln right now:
I found a slide in a PowerPoint I did for a 2005 conference presentation, which pegged the number of liquor licenses at 373. We appear to have 108 more licenses in 2014 than in 2005, a 29% increase in the past decade. My vague recollection is that the entire City had less than 100 liquor licenses when I pinned on the badge in the summer of 1974.
There’s a lot of research about the correlation of alcohol outlets with crime and disorder, particularly associating the density of outlets with these phenomenon. We certainly have some areas in Lincoln with a dense concentration of licenses, but I’m of the opinion that the relationship of alcohol outlets to crime and disorder is quite different based on the type of outlets and their business practices. Don’t let the customers get drunk, and problems are considerably reduced, both inside the establishment and in the general neighborhood.
Visit Director Casady’s blog.
