The Battle to Keep Alcohol From Kids

Four teens were dead, the victims of youthful foolishness and a careless merchant. But there was another key player in the tragedy--the state agency that regulates the 70,000 places Californians can buy or consume alcohol.

One of those outlets is Me-N-Paul’s, an Anaheim convenience store where a clerk sold seven six-packs of beer to the carload of teenagers in June 1995. Hours later, a 17-year-old driver drunk on that beer lost control of his car on a desert road, killing four companions.

Me-N-Paul’s had been caught earlier selling alcohol to minors, just eight months before the fatal night. But all the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control did was suspend the store’s sales license for 10 days and fine the owner $370--penalties well short of what the agency could have imposed.

The day after the crash, which unleashed a blizzard of bad publicity, the ABC announced it would revoke Me-N-Paul’s license.

It still hasn’t.

Why it hasn’t is a reflection of just how far out of step California’s alcohol policies are with society’s current concerns over buying and drinking alcohol, especially teenage drinking.

According to a Times computer analysis of more than 3,000 ABC cases over an approximately 13-month period, and extensive interviews:

* The ABC is hobbled by rules rooted in the anti-saloon movement of the late 1800s; since the agency was created in the 1950s, the Legislature has never systematically revised its priorities.

* Penalties for store and bar owners who sell to underage drinkers are inconsistent and typically more lenient than those imposed for morals violations such as showing lewd videos or allowing bookmaking, or for breaking rules on proper signage.

* The ABC is understaffed, its work force eroded by deep budget cutbacks in the 1990s.

At the opposite extreme from the case of the Orange County teenagers was the treatment of Fernando Granillo. ABC agents busted his restaurant in North Hills under the B-girl rule, which prohibits a female employee from asking a customer to buy her a drink.

The agency revoked his license, putting him out of business. Although B-girls are almost unheard-of today--a cliche from western movie saloon scenes--the ABC reacts swiftly and implacably when any pop up, a reflection of its concentration on the social problems of generations past.

Critics of the agency say the dissimilar handling of the two cases illustrates a double standard that hinders local efforts to control teen drinking.

The Times analysis, which covered the period from the end of August 1994 to the start of October 1995, showed that 66.7% of the rare B-Girl prosecutions brought by the ABC ended in license revocation for the first offense.

By contrast, the penalties for sales to minors were among the lightest the agency imposed, averaging a 9.6-day suspension and a fine of about $593 for a first offense, and only moderately more severe for repeat offenders. Only 0.4% of such cases led to license revocation.

“It’s sort of like, ‘Kids will be kids. They all have to start drinking sometime,’ ” said Joan Kiley, president of the California Council on Alcohol Policy, an Oakland advocacy group.

*

Emanuel Espinoza, ABC chief deputy director, responds: “There may be a perception that a first violation results in a slap on the wrist, but we think it’s been effective.

“When you talk about whether that is tough or not, it depends on what side of the fence you’re on. I know that the retailers think the laws right now aren’t fair.

The California Grocers’ Assn. wants to see more “penalties on the minor who is purchasing the product,” said Peter Larkin, the association’s president.

Although police can cite minors for possessing alcohol--and say they frequently do in parks, on the street and at parties--some retailers still feel they get little help from authorities where it counts, inside their stores.

“They keep coming. They try again, try again,” Glendale liquor store owner Jung S. Kang said of the teenagers who pose as adults and then walk away scot free when he catches them. “We don’t think it’s fair, but what can we do?”

“If we call the police, they know the police come after one hour,” said another owner, Resham Singh. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

The Times computer analysis also showed that the degree to which ABC rules are enforced--particularly those meant to prevent underage drinking--depends largely on the initiative of local police, who generate 80% of all ABC cases. The result: Enforcement differs wildly from one city or county to another.

Because of police departments’ increasing focus on youth violence and accidents related to alcohol, decoy programs to catch merchants selling to minors produced 44.6% of all actions brought against license holders. In all, 58% of ABC disciplinary cases involved minors.

However, despite local law enforcement’s clear message that underage drinking is a top alcohol-regulation priority, the state metes out much tougher penalties for licensees caught bookmaking (average 20-day suspension) and for after-hours consumption (average 16-day suspension). Those caught with a lewd video--or who simply left the videotape’s cardboard jacket, featuring sexy photos, where it could be seen by minors--got 13.7 days.

And strangely, the average suspension for failing to post a “No Patron Under 21” sign in a bar was 17.5 days. But the far commoner offense of actually allowing a minor to enter drew an average suspension of only 10.7 days.

In the underage decoy operations, police generally use Police Explorer Scouts, teenagers who have volunteered for training as law enforcement cadets. Police then turn violations over to one of the ABC’s 24 district offices. The ABC, if it finds the evidence strong enough, brings a civil action against the license holder before a state administrative law judge, recommending a specific punishment.

The ABC can accept or reject the administrative law judge’s ruling, and the license holder, if displeased with the decision, can appeal.

Interviews with police, alcohol policy advocates, industry representatives and ABC officials draw a picture of an underfunded, politically hogtied agency striving against 1990s problems with regulations conceived in 19th century mores.

When the ABC was established, it inherited a legacy of the anti-saloon movement of the late 1800s, epitomized by ax-wielding Carrie Nation, which triumphed with the passage of nationwide Prohibition in 1920.

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After the constitutional amendment banning all alcoholic drinks was finally repealed in 1933, state regulators wrote into the founding documents of the ABC’s predecessor agencies a host of prescriptions against 19th century vices, such as B-girls, ownership of liquor outlets by distillers and free beer with saloon lunches.

Although the frontier social climate that spawned such laws has largely disappeared, the Legislature has never systematically revised the ABC act. For example, when the liquor-distilling Seagram Co. in 1995 bought 80% of the MCA entertainment conglomerate--which owns restaurants with bars--the state Legislature had to pass a special law authorizing the purchase.

“At some point, I think these regulations are going to fall,” said San Francisco attorney John Hinman, who represents alcohol industry interests. “They’re truly antiquated and deserve to be fundamentally revisited.”

Many critics doubt, however, that significant change is likely as long as the agency’s mission is divided between the twin purposes of promoting business--and revenues for the state--by issuing alcohol licenses and spending money to crack down on bad licensees. The same field agents handle both responsibilities, dividing their time as best they can between the roughly 13,500 license applications and 3,200 accusations a year.

“I think the ABC is trying to become more receptive to what local communities really want,” said Kiley of the Oakland watchdog group. “But frankly they are caught between a rock and hard place. In their licensing capacity, they are a revenue-generating part of state government. At the same time, communities throughout California have been expressing their frustration with the lack of enforcement by the ABC.”

ABC officials acknowledge some shortcomings and inconsistencies in enforcement. Partly they blame the state’s budget crisis, which nearly eliminated the agency’s enforcement staff in 1991, a loss from which it is only now recovering.

The department is reviewing its penalty standards and said it will get tougher on some violations, such as selling to the obviously intoxicated, but is satisfied that its policy on sales to minors is as effective as can be practically hoped for.

The department is trying to devote more of its limited resources to issues important to communities, like underage drinking, and fewer to offenses such as bar girls, but is constrained by state law, Espinoza said.

“I’ve always questioned that too, but the [B-girl] statute is there--it says the department shall revoke” licenses for violating it.

ABC records are rife with disciplinary proceedings that seem to have little real-world relevance.

It’s OK, for example, for Black Angus restaurants to lure customers by offering free chicken wings and calling it “Happy Hour.”

But when Yankee Doodle’s in Long Beach offered its customers a free pitcher of beer with their pizza, the ABC slapped a 25-day suspension on the family pool parlor for crossing the fine line between giving free food to sell drinks (legal) and giving free drinks to sell food (illegal).

ABC officials still would like to keep and enforce regulations against lewd conduct, moral turpitude and bar girls, even if they don’t want to go out looking for them. Often, they say, these violations indicate there are more serious--but harder to prove--offenses such as prostitution, money laundering and drug sales.

But armed with recent studies linking alcohol to the last decade’s sharp rise in violent juvenile crime, watchdog groups and social scientists fault the ABC for treating sales to minors too lightly.

“It’s a cultural thing. We wink and nod at kids,” said medical researcher Richard Schribner, who last year published one of a number of recent studies linking alcohol and crime and juvenile traffic deaths.

A UC Berkeley study of three Bay Area cities concluded that access to alcohol is the major predictor for juvenile violence. In Santa Rosa, a community study reported that 89% of high school juniors said alcohol was “easy to get.”

A 1995 national drug use survey by University of Michigan researchers found that 33.2% of high school seniors reported being drunk at least once in the prior 30 days, an increase of 2.4% over 1994.

“It really is a serious thing, especially when you realize that the No. 1 killer of kids is alcohol,” through violence and drunk driving, said Schribner. “They should be treated as serious offenses.”

Critics say the threat of ABC penalties is just not severe enough to counter profits to be made on sales to minors, particularly in the case of convenience stores that can continue to do business in food and other merchandise during a suspension, merely halting alcohol sales for a week or two.

“We felt that was a real problem, that the punishments were too light and that suspensions were not meaningful--[they] merely became a cost of business for the licensee,” said Assistant Los Angeles City Atty. Earl Thomas, who has quarreled with the ABC over licensing and enforcement practices for years.

“There were times when stores were violating with impunity.”

In the ABC’s defense, however, the average 10-day suspension is probably one of the toughest penalties in the nation for selling to a minor, said Robert L. Hammond, director of the Michigan-based Alcohol Research Information Service.

Elsewhere, Hammond said, “That minors violation isn’t generally treated that seriously. There’s a ton of it that goes on, and they just catch a few of them.”

The penalties for violating about 100 state and federal laws affecting alcohol licensees are handed down by state administrative law judges who hear ABC accusations. Generally, they follow a list of standard penalties published in the ABC Act.

The list suggests a 15-day suspension for selling to a minor, a penalty at the low end of the sanctions available to the department.

The standard recommended penalty for consumption after hours, for refilling a bottle, for selling to an intoxicated person or for tending bar while intoxicated is a 20-day suspension. It goes up to 30 days for violations such as having nude dancers, stocking an alcoholic beverage not permitted by license, allowing gambling, possession of football cards or refusing to allow inspection of records.

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And while the average penalties actually imposed for many offenses are close to the recommended suspension, the 9.6-day average suspension for sale to minors was less than two-thirds of the possible 15-day penalty for that offense, partly because the offenders were allowed to pay a fine in lieu of part of the suspension.

ABC records show that first-time offenders seldom lose their licenses for selling to a minor. Repeat offenders often face only incremental increases as the violations pile up.

On the second offense, the penalty for sale to a minor decoy rose to an average suspension of 11.7 days and for the third to 15.1 days. Only 4.7% of the 49 third-time offenders in that 13-month period lost their licenses.

An example is the K Lay store in Calabasas, caught in January 1995 for the fourth time selling alcohol to a minor decoy. The penalty rose from the five-day suspension that followed its third violation to a 10-day actual suspension, with another 10 days stayed in exchange for a fine.

Despite that, a decoy sent to the store in March, only two months after the fourth offense, was still able to buy alcohol. For that fifth violation, the ABC revoked the store’s license.

Inspired by such horror stories, the Legislature last year passed a three-strikes law that authorizes the ABC to revoke a license after three citations for selling to a minor. The same law also increases the penalties for two-time violators by doubling the amount they must pay in exchange for having suspensions stayed.

However, ABC records showed no sign that the stiffer penalties were used in the law’s first 10 months on the books.

Nor have any licenses been revoked under the three-strikes provision to date, and only one--against a Pacoima store--is pending.

One reason is that citations issued before the law took effect do not count, Espinoza said.

Even assuming that the three-strikes law will kick in one day, there is no remedy in sight for the patchwork enforcement pattern that leaves most communities exposed to the lapses of store clerks who know no one is watching.

The ABC employs about 200 agents to police 70,000 licenses across the state, a ratio that makes comprehensive enforcement all but impossible, ABC and police officials say.

The void can only be filled by local enforcement, causing sometimes extreme disparities.

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In Los Angeles County, 30 cities and unincorporated areas produced all 228 alcohol license violation cases handled in the 13-month period. Sixteen of those had only one case. Twenty cities and 10 unincorporated communities had no cases at all. Seventy-six jurisdictions--including Burbank, a city of 100,000--had no minor decoy cases.

But when police do send out decoys, they succeed 30% to 50% of the time, even though notices are first mailed to every retailer, warning them the operation is coming.

Chris Coulter, a 19-year-old cadet for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, went on five sting operations, hitting 10 to 15 stores a night. About 30% of the clerks sold to him, he said, including three he showed his driver’s license--with his true age, two years too young to purchase alcohol.

Once his partner got a six-pack from a clerk who had the warning notice of the coming sting posted at the counter, he said.

“If a [minor] was persistent enough and went to enough stores, they’d find a store that would sell alcohol,” Coulter said.

And consequently there are cities like Anaheim that do their best and still encounter tragedy. Eight times in slightly more than a year, from 1994 to 1995, the Anaheim Police Department had dispatched minors to stores across the city. Despite advance warning that the stings were coming, 48 merchants were caught selling the youths alcohol, including Me-N-Paul’s.

Yet, it was only a few months after a 10-day suspension of its alcohol sales license in that crackdown that Me-N-Paul’s sold beer to the teenagers whose car crashed in the desert, killing four.

Sgt. Steve Walker, who investigated the case, lives with a taste of failure. Even though his efforts ended with a misdemeanor conviction this summer of the owner of Me-N-Paul’s, the store is still open.

After a yearlong investigation, the ABC in August granted the store owner until February to sell his license. An ABC official said the deal hastened the agency’s goal--getting the owner out of the alcohol business. He could have prolonged the case for another year by pressing his defense, that the teenagers used phony identification, which judges consider a mitigating factor, depending on how authentic the false document looked and how well it matched the purchaser.

“We have to work within our system,” Walker acknowledged bitterly. “But they are still selling alcohol there.”

Times data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this story.

Next: Computer analysis of the state’s 70,000 liquor licenses.

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Alcohol Licensing and Enforcement

A Times computer analysis of liquor licenses and more than 3,000 cases handled during a 13-month period by the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control found a pattern of lenient and inconsistent penalties for selling liquor to minors especially when compared to the often harsher sanctions for more esoteric violation.

Length of Average Suspension

Average penalties in ABC cases are much more severe for a handful of morals, drug and administrative violations than they are for sales of alcohol to minors.

Possession of Controlled Substance: 23.1 Days

Purchase Stolen Property: 21.7 Days

Bar Girls: 20.1 Days

Bookmaking: 20.0 Days

Possession of Bookmaking Paraphernalia: 20.0 Days

Show Lewd Video: 20.0 Days

Possession of Firearm: 20.0 Days

Failure to Post “21” Sign: 17.5 Days

Possession of Slot Machine: 16.3 Days

Unauthorized Use of Food Coupons: 15.0 Days

Disorderly Premises: 15.0 Days

Possession of Drug Paraphernalia: 14.6 Days

Violation of Special Licensing and Conditions: 14.2

Lewd Conduct: 13.7 Days

Sale to Minor: 12.8 Days

Display of Lewd Material: 12.0 Days

Sale to Non-Member of Private Club: 11.0 Days

Sale to Minor (Decoy): 9.6 Days

Wholesale Vending to Unlicensed Retailer: 8.6 Days

Moral Turpitude (95% Revoked): 1.5 Days

Source: Times computer analysis of California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control information.

Types of Cases

More than half of ABC accusations are for sales to minors.

Sale to Minor (Decoy): 46%

Other: 23%

Sale to Minor: 9%

Violation of conditions: 6%

Intoxicated Patron: 5%

Moral Turpitude: 3%

Permit Minor to Enter: 3%

Bar Girls: 3%

Possession of Slot Machine: 2%

Other Key Findings:

* Southern California’s urban counties generally have fewer licenses per capita than much of the rest of the state. San Francisco and several rural counties have the highest ratios.

* The state budget crisis had an adverse effect on the enforcement of ABC rules. Even though the agency’s budget remained stable in 1991, its enforcement dropped sharply when Gov. Pete Wilson ordered all agents to process license applications, which generate revenue, rather than go after violators.