My open letter to Durham University Police

Dear Durham University Police,

You are getting it all wrong. You are targeting the safe environment of college bars and formals and so driving students away in favour of this ‘new craze’ the BBC picked up on, ‘prinking’.

If the police want students to get less drunk then they should make college bars the place to be. College bars have people who are specifically there to stop people getting to drunk and kindly intervene when someone is trying to make them down some double gin with a vomit chaser.

Police selfie

Putting rules in place isn’t going to make people drink less, it’s going to make people drink more, at home, where there’s no one to judge them when they really do take it too far.

As for compulsory IDing, I’m pretty sure there isn’t a mass underage drinking problem in college bars. There are usually about 3 underage people per year in freshers, because in Scotland they let people out of school too early, and their pictures are up in the bar so staff know not to serve them.

Excellent photojournalism – the police in Collingwood bar –

It is a sad phenomenon in Durham that locals and students are pretty easy to tell apart. I think we’d know if there was a mass problem of underage locals in college bar.

Two police people are wasting their time sitting in Collingwood bar every Wednesday for an hour, waiting for someone to buy two Jaeger Bombs at once so they can stop some ‘irresponsible drinking’. No, that really happened at Mildert.

Stop treating us like criminals. There are worse problems out there.

Police crack-down

For instance each student is only entitled to 6 hours of counselling a year, why don’t we do some budget shuffling and say that each hour of police time sitting in Collingwood bar watching rugby boys down pints is spent on an hour of counselling for a student suffering from mental illness, because I’d like to not have to hear about another student suicide attempt before I graduate.

You don’t see Police spending every week outside here

Or if you really have so much police budget to kill why not try and make people realise that groping my arse in Klute is illegal. I’ve heard of much more cases of sexual violence while I’ve been at university than 17 year olds drinking snakebites on university property.

If you insist on worrying about people getting drunk, stand on the corner of North Road, or outside Jimmy Allens, where you can do useful stuff like stopping people fighting. And if you’re really worried about drugs, I’m sure we can all think of places they are more likely to be than a Burn’s Night formal. The library might even be a good starting point apparently.

Sort your priorities

All these new bar rules are doing is losing colleges money and demonising students. More students will ditch downing very reasonably priced pints in the bar, in favour of downing dirt-cheap cider by the litre in their rooms.

Leave us alone Durham University Police and try and focus on people who are actually breaking the law.

Love Flo,

P.S. Sort out your twitter, it’s not helping with the whole public image business.