Wickersham report

The Wickersham report was a product of the 1929 presidential campaign of Herbert Hoover, while supporting the eighteenth amendment, Hoover realized that prohibition was not working, it led to bootlegging and the development of organized crime. Thus, he established the first national look at American policing.

President Hoover appointed George Wickersham, attorney general from the Taft administration, to preside over the National Committee on Law Observation and Enforcement, or Wickersham Commission, whose object was to study and recommend changes to the eighteenth amendment, and to observe police practices in the states.

The Commission released a report in 1931 that supported the law, but found contempt among average Americans and unworkable enforcement across the states, corruption in police ranks, local politics and problems in every community that attempted to enforce the law.

Further, the Wickersham Report castigated the police for their “general failure … to detect and arrest criminals guilty of the many murders, spectacular bank, payroll and other holdups and sensational robberies with guns.”