Gambling and its Data Sources
Discrepancies in the orthodox view of illegal gambling call into question the data sources used in developing such an orthodoxy.
The orthodox view, which assumes that organized plays a dominant role in illegal gambling, was developed almost exclusively from reports by gambling enforcement agencies.
The various investigation committees and president's commissions provided an influential forum for officials to present their own viewpoints.
With few exceptions public hearings on organized crime in the last twenty-five years have served to validate the opinions of law enforcement officials.
When public officials testify before legislative and administrative bodies, they rarely present independent evidence to substantiate their statements.
Often, to buttress their conclusions, they cite information developed within their own departments.
The analytical ability of police departments is open to serious debt, especially in cases that might shake prevailing doctrine.
Donald Cressey, for example, indicated that his sources consisted of 'materials submitted to the Commission' and interviews with 'knowledgeable policemen and investigators.'
Although research into organized crime is fraught with personal and methodological peril, reliance on information from police sources is questionable.
That police reports must be viewed with skepticism and that such reports often tell more about the police than about the criminals, is a sociological axiom that applies to much of the research into organized crime.
After analysis twenty influential criminology books, J. Galiher and J. cain concluded that authors of criminology textbooks have purveyed a common belief in the conspiratorial threat by organized crime usually without indicating the limitation of their sources.
Since social scientists have largely limited themselves to secondary sources of data, particularly government documents, in their analysis of organized crime, they could not be expected to give an independent challenge to such sources.
More recently, researchers have criticized 'mainline' organized-crime research for its failure to consider independent and alternative source that has been neglected by researchers is participants.
Researchers who generate their own data, rather than relying on official sources, present a far different picture of organized crime than does the government. Albinni, Ianni, and Reuss-Ianni were among the first to conduct empirical studies of organized crime and to challenge the government's view that twelve crime families (La Cosa Nostra) controlled organized crimes in the United States.
Their pioneering studies of criminal organizations, done in the early 1970s and conducted from a ethnographic perspective, refuted the existence of a national cabal of Mafiosi who dominate organized crime.
From a similar perspective, Chambliss, in 1975, called for organized-crime researchers to eschew official reports and instead look for data sources in the field.
His own study of Seattle crime activities, one that portrays organized crime differently than traditional research does, is one such example.
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