One part of the current Sydney lockout laws review is a statistical investigation of violence in and around The Star casino – one of the few city venues excluded from the lockouts.
Next week, NSW crime statistician the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) will release a stack of info on this matter with public research entitled “Did the ‘lockout law’ reforms increase assaults at The Star casino, Pyrmont?”
It doesn’t look great for our mates at The Star – when this kind of study was last attempted, it found that there were 6.3 incidents per month between February and September 2014, which was an increase of 3.5 on the period in the previous year. This made The Star possibly the most violent venue in NSW – a fact often repeated by lockouts campaigners. Even more than The Ivy.
The BOCSAR report will use police reports and records to ascertain exactly how many incidents occurred in 2015 around the casino.
But The Star ain’t buying it (obviously). They claim that assaults are actually down from 2014 to 2015, and say that police are wrongly blaming them for incidents that either did not occur on the premises, or involved people that had not attended the venue.
It’s a potentially dodgy argument, given how relatively isolated The Star is from other venues in the area. It’d be hard for them to make the case that their precinct should be excluded from a government lockout zone.
“We believe BOCSAR statistics do not provide a true or accurate reflection of events at The Star, in that a number of assaults linked to The Star occurred away from the property and involved individuals or groups who had not attended the property,” a spokesperson told the Sydney Morning Herald.
There ya go, #casinomike. Someone’s got your back.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald.
Photo: Getty Images / Kok Kai Ng.
