Too many law-enforcement agencies look the other way

Current practice comes up three lemons

If the General assembly wants to use gambling revenue to help pay for the new Indianapolis Colts stadium/convention center project, why not tax a currently untaxed form of gambling that's already going strong instead of building a casino in Indianapolis and installing pull-tab machines, just tax video poker.

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It's all over the state. You don't have to look hard to find the machines in Grant County. And even though video poker is illegal, if you go to enough bars and restaurants, you'll know how seriously authorities take the state's law against it.

And if authorities aren't willing to enforce the laws against video poker, let's get them out of circulation. They areillegal, after all.

Video poker in Indiana rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars, untaxed and with law-enforcement officials obviously looking the other way.

Like it or not, gambling is here. The state even promotes it.

There are between 15,000 and 30,000 video poker machines in the state, according to published reports quoting Capt. Robin Poindexter of the Indiana Excise Police.

Since this is a surreptitious business, there are no official tallies of how much money the machines haul in, but a study by the Indiana Licensed Beverage Association estimated that legalizing the machines and taxing the revenue could bring in up to $382 million for the state. The low estimate was $144 million annually, still a tidy sum.

And in a state hurting for money as much as Indiana is, that amount of money is worth noticing.

In Oregon, where the machines are legal and taxed, they account for about $500 million in revenue for the state.

The editorial board is not looking for more gambling in Indiana. We have enough already - the Hoosier Lottery, Powerball, casinos, riverboats, horse tracks. But certain facts can't be ignored:


It is not going to go away. People obviously like to play it, or there would not be so many machines.

Police and prosecutors routinely look the other way, and there's no indication that's going to stop, at least in most Indiana counties.
Although possession of a gambling device is a felony, Hoosier prosecutors seldom press criminal charges because they face long odds in winning convictions, Rebecca McClure, deputy director of the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council, told Gamblingmaga-zine.comin a Dec. 13 story.

And since the legalization of casinos, she said, "They care even less now."

(Some counties, such as Whitley and Steuben, are confiscating and destroying machines, so some authorities obviously take the law seriously.)

n Although many people equate gambling with activities such as drinking and smoking, the state recognizes that it happens, and it taxes people who choose to do them.

So, if authorities are going to ignore the law, and if people are going to take advantage of it and break the law, the activity might as well be legalized and turned into a money-maker for the state.

Or, maybe authorities can simply start enforcing the law.

Source: Chronicle Tribune