Woodbury saw an unusually high number of businesses fail recent alcohol- and tobacco-compliance checks.
Why was that?
“We used more realistic-aged decoys,” said Wendy Simone, investigative technician with the . “That made a profound difference. We haven’t had this many failures in a long time.”
The police department typically puts the word out internally for decoys, Simone said, and officers worked to get more age-appropriate people for the recent checks.
The decoys don’t use fake identification—they use their own IDs or claim they left it in the car.
When a business fails a compliance check, the employee who sold the alcohol or tobacco is charged with a gross misdemeanor or misdemeanor, respectively. Police have the option of issuing a warning or $500 citation to the offending business. They usually choose the latter.
“We take this extremely seriously,” Simone said.
Police also assume there’s some contact between businesses when officers do compliance checks, so they try to spread the effort out over a few months, Simone said. Officers try to check every alcohol- or tobacco-selling business in Woodbury once a year.
Compliance Failures
Alcohol
- (Eagle Creek Lane)
Tobacco
- (Queens Drive)
- (Woodlane Drive)
- (Lake Road Terrace)
