“I know for a fact it’s not making the drugs box.” How door staff in the night-time economy are handling drugs.

• In Event: Violence, alcohol and other drugs

Abstract

Door staff (colloquially, bouncers) are an integral part of the private security milieu in the UK and are often the most visible form of ‘policing’ within the night-time economy (NTE). Their role is complex in numerous ways including but not limited to, dealing with intoxicated customers, being both recipients and perpetrators of violence, and conducting searches and confiscating drugs. Door staff are an under-researched area in criminology and are a notoriously difficult network to recruit for research. This presentation will address two key areas of my ongoing doctoral research. The first part of the presentation explores the challenges in recruiting clandestine networks (in this instance door staff) to research, and the use of social media as a recruitment tool for such research. The second part discusses some of the issues that door staff face in their policing of drugs drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews and one period of observation in a busy northern city. The presentation concludes with the initial findings which suggest that door staff are left to police drugs in the NTE at their own discretion, with factors such as loss of work and removal of their certification at the forefront of their decision making.

Author

• samuel david gianfranco hinrichs, University of York