Police Regulation of Illegal Gambling: Frustrations of Symbolic Enforcement

This article examines problems presented to the police by their gambling enforcement responsibilities during the four decades following Prohibition's repeal. In this period repeated gambling corruption scandals put the police in disrepute. These scandals accurately reflected the underlying corruption of an effort that was essentially symbolic and not supported by a significant element of the otherwise law-abiding population. The fundamental source of the corruption was the vulnerability of all illegal gambling organizations to police harassment. This corruption also contributed to organized crime's dominance in illegal gambling. The federal government mounted a major campaign against illegal gambling between 1962 and 1972. That effort failed to reduce the availability of gambling services but may have helped reduce the dominance of organized crime by depriving local police of their ability to franchise monopolies. Together with changing attitudes toward gambling, the entry of the state into many gambling markets, and changes in the nature of the games themselves, the federal enforcement effort helped end the era in which gambling enforcement was a major responsibility for the police.