Corruption in Evidence: Policing Starting- Price Betting in 1930s NSW

Abstract

This thesis analyses two Royal Commissions into the policing of SP bookmaking that the NSW government issued in 1936 and 1937. These Commissions provide a window into the social history of betting and policing, as well as the relationship between two groups whose activities placed them so directly in each other’s paths. The Royal Commissions also reflect the politics of betting and policing contemporaneous to them. The inquiries are symptomatic of deeper-rooted public concerns about off-course betting, and represent a poorly articulated, but publically supported disapproval of police tactics. I find that these Commissions are suggestive of lower-level police complicity in off-course betting and that senior police were at least tacitly complicit in their activities. Moreover, I explore why it was that in face of such overwhelming evidence the Inquiry’s Commissioner was reluctant to find conclusively that the evidence demonstrated police corruption.