Seven Chapel Hill Restaurants Cited for Serving Alcohol to Underage Buyer

Chapel Hill Police cited seven businesses late last week for violating state alcohol laws.

Chapel Hill Police Lieutenant Josh Mecimore says law enforcement will periodically run compliance checks on local establishments, the most recent of which was last Thursday night.

“Thursday nights are typically a pretty busy nights for bars,” he says. “We sometimes will do compliance checks on Thursday nights, Friday nights, Saturday nights – the busier nights – because we know that people are, unfortunately, more likely to be complacent when checking ID’s when they’re busy.”

Mecimore says 34 businesses were targeted as part of the investigation.

“We had seven – Tobacco Road, Red Lotus, Sandwhich, Breadmen’s, Chipotle, Four Corners, and Cosmic Cantina – where servers were cited for serving to an underage buyer,” he says. “That, for us at least, is a drastic reduction in the fail rate that we had from the same time period last year, 50 percent of the businesses that we checked failed. And then we did one in June where 37 percent failed.

“That seven out of 34 is a good increase. It’s not where we’d like it to be; we’d like to have zero [failures].”

Mecimore adds the citations in these situations are issued directly to the servers.

“It’s the server’s responsibility to ensure that everybody that they serve is of legal age,” he says. “The employee that serves the alcohol in these compliance checks will get issued a citation for violating that state law.

“But the violation is also reported to the North Carolina ABC Commission, so that the ABC Commission knows that that business was found to not be in compliance.”

He says at that point, the businesses may be ordered to attend training that is offered by the police department known as BARS – or be a responsible server.

“Have us give them some education on what to look for when looking at fake ID’s,” he says, “what their responsibilities are, what we expect of them, and what will happen to them if they are caught outside of those rules.”

Mecimore says some businesses choose to send employees to this training before they are required by court after a finding of noncompliance.

Mecimore says there are no set guidelines put forward to choose the locations checked during compliance investigations, but there are some factors brought into consideration.

“Some of those are picked because we’ve had noncompliance there before,” he says, “where you’re going back and checking the same businesses. And some of them are new businesses because they’ve popped up since [the last compliance check].”

Mecimore says more compliance checks will be done in the future, but there is no timeframe for the operation.

Seven Chapel Hill Restaurants Cited for Serving Alcohol to Underage Buyer

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