Criminal Justice Case Analysis

Best Answer: Basically it was created as the Bureau of Investigation in 1908 to give the U.S. Attorney General an investigative staff of his own within the Justice Department to gather evidence for the prosecution of the few federal crimes then on the books. Prior to this the Justice Department had relied on investigators furnished by the U.S. Secret Service. Among the early crimes placed by Congress within the investigative jurisdiction of the Bureau were opium smuggling (1908), interstate transportation of women for immoral purposes (1910), and interstate transportation of stolen motor vehicles (1919). They did not, and do not, investigate federal crimes that were either Postal (mail robbery, mail fraud, etc.) or Treasury (counterfeiting, tax evasion, etc.) violations. In the early days the agents

Adopting to modern technology, these criminals, including the likes of John Dillinger, "Baby Face" Nelson, "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the Barker-Karpis Gang, "Machine Gun" Kelly and others, were also often better financed and equipped than were local police. During the Depression, high-profile crimes such as the Lindbergh kidnapping and the Kansas City Union Station Massacre showed the need for federalized crime control. Hoover and his superior, Attorney General Homer S. Cummings, successfully lobbied Congress for the passage of new anti-crime laws in 1934 which made the Division of Investigation virtually a national police force charged with enforcement of the new laws. The federal anti-crime bills of 1934 armed agents of the future FBI and gave them full arrest powers, also made it a federal crime to assault or kill a federal agent, bribe a federal prison officer, rob a federal bank, possess an unlicensed machine gun, flee across state lines to avoid prosecution,