Development of comprehensive measures of alcohol-policy enforcement

Alcohol control policies can reduce the health and social problems that result from alcohol use and abuse; however, adequate enforcement is needed for these policies to be effective. Little is known about patterns of alcohol enforcement among law enforcement agencies. We sought to address this knowledge gap by surveying a random sample of 1,632 local law enforcement agencies located across the 50 states in the U.S. regarding a wide variety of alcohol enforcement activities (response rate 66.3%; n=1,082). Our goal was first to characterize patterns of alcohol enforcement activities for each of five key domains at the agency level, and then to aggregate these results to the state level to obtain a statewide enforcement measure. The domains included: 1) underage possession and consumption, 2) underage provision, 3) underage compliance checks, 4) drinking and driving, and 5) overservice. For each domain, we measured five to seven enforcement activities, and used latent class analysis (LCA) to identify groups of agencies based on these enforcement activities. We identified three to five groups of agencies for each domain. For example, in the underage-provision domain (with six types of enforcement activities) we identified three classes: 1) agencies focused primarily on social-host enforcement (22%), 2) agencies focused primarily on education efforts (15%), and 3) agencies with little underage-provision enforcement (63%). In addition to agency-level findings, we will present results in which we aggregated the classes of the five domains to the state level. Implications for how findings can help shape law enforcement practices will be discussed.