From what Galvanized describes ("I've witnessed the mayhem on Douglas St. It goes from the Mac's on Yates down to Johnson near the Pizza place and across to 7-11."), it sounds a little bit like something one could expect in the UK. I still don't see why individual businesses should be targetted for reprisals, though.
By "expect in the UK," I'm thinking of their ASBO laws (stands for "Anti Social Behaviour Orders," see [url=http://www.crimereduction.gov.uk/antisocialbehaviour/antisocialbehaviour55.htm:02a38]here[/url:02a38] and [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour_order:02a38]here[/url:02a38].
From the first link (above):
Anti-social behaviour is given a wide meaning by the legislation – to paraphrase the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, it is behaviour that causes or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more people who are not in the same household as the perpetrator.
ASBO tries to target "quality of life" crimes / issues.
The only problem is that ASBOs haven't been that effective in a culture where being a yobbo is "cool" 'cause it shows how anti-establishment you are. The ASBOs are actually kind of creepy -- not really "1984," more like Kafka, maybe. (Which perhaps is what makes them different from the US model, which is harder/ harsher?)
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Dalrymple:02a38]Theodore Dalrymple[/url:02a38] seems to think that anti-smoking laws, political correctness, and the
imperative to go forth and enjoy yourself (get drunk, get loud, make a mess) are creating a culture of corporate fascism, where it ain't the hard jack-boot in the face (as described by Orwell, say), but more the professional classes of therapists who will (as per Kafka) control your life. See his interesting review of Frank Furedi's book, Therapy Culture, [url=http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1023034/posts:02a38]here[/url:02a38]. Dalrymple of course worked for decades as a prison psychiatrist and saw plenty of deranged behaviour, both at work and in his neighbourhood. He has made a career of writing about it. See, for example, his 1999 article, [url=http://www.newstatesman.com/199907260022:02a38]They dance; I take the dog for a walk[/url:02a38], where he compares "southern" and "northern" ways of having fun. We northerners force it, which is why it goes all wrong:
Fleshly pleasure does not come easily to northerners: they have to work hard to achieve it. Anyone who has seen a German **rnographic film (widely available on televisions in hotels throughout the world) will know what I mean. Here sex seems more a duty, or even an engineering problem, than a sensual pleasure. (...)
Anyone who observes young Britons having a good time cannot help but hear the same false note. Their abandoned pursuit of pleasure is not carefree, but anxious. One Saturday night recently I went to Chester for a concert and watched the revelry in the streets. They were not the young of the underclass, but people with money to spend. It seemed that none of them could laugh without shrieking or speak without yelling: it was as if they were trying, by outward signs of grace such as vomiting and falling over, to convince each other that they were having a marvellous time. There was a definite strain in the air.
The grossness of their behaviour was also obvious and deliberate, a reaction to what would once have counted as decorum. They swigged beer from bottles, dropped litter within a few feet of litter bins, staggered about with complete disregard for other pedestrians and made the ancient streets echo with the sound of their raucous, though unconvincing, laughter. Since they had an inalienable right to seek pleasure, and since it is universally agreed that restraint is the enemy of all pleasure, it followed that the less restrained they were, the more pleasure they were having.
Pleasure taken in this spirit, however, is almost indistinguishable from duty, though duty that serves no good or useful purpose. This is hedonism as hard work; and it is not surprising that such hedonism is often accompanied by puritanical impulses that make themselves felt in other directions: for example, with regard to smoking or in the phenomenon of political correctness.
In a more recent essay (2006, in City Journal), [url=http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_oh_to_be.html:02a38]It's This Bad[/url:02a38], he chronicles the UK's revolving door justice system and its seeming inability to differentiate between the serious and the trivial. A young drunk guy who walks up to a horse-mounted policeman and says, "Excuse me, do you realize your horse is gay?" gets two squad cars and an arrest for making "a homophobic remark," while other drunk young people who beat someone into a coma (and it's not their first offence) more or less walk away.
So, in that sort of soft-fascism culture, it's more important to control people's thinking ("bad boy, that's sooo homophobic!") than their actions, according to Dalrymple's jaundiced view of Britain's present justice system. He also rails against anti-smoking laws, since smoking isn't illegal (he references the move to make smoking illegal in prisons, for prisoners; he writes: "At bottom, the proposal looks like the arbitrary bullying of a defenseless population in a fit of Pecksniffian moral enthusiasm. It is to deprive that population of a small privilege long accepted by custom and usage. And, of course, the moral enthusiasts of the government will not bear the practical cost of enforcing the ban; the prison wardens will."). To him, it's all thought-control, a Kafka-esque kind of internal prison, with not a good result.
We had plenty of previous discussions on this board re. how these drunks & rowdies & urinators aren't the poor and homeless and generally oppressed, but the well-off folk from the suburbs. So is Dalrymple right -- that they are taking "pleasure as duty,"
have to drink to excess, pee into doorways, and throw garbage about ...because that's what "free" and "liberated" and "fun-loving" party animals do? And the reaction is as puritanical as their "fun," namely shutting down businesses? So we still don't know how to get people to behave with some decorum and plain old good manners? That's pretty bad...