For a start, it introduced an entirely new level of danger to American life. The national murder rate went up by almost a third after Prohibition was introduced. Being a Prohibition agent was dangerous—in the first two and a half years of Prohibition thirty agents were killed on the job—but being in the vicinity of agents was often dangerous, too, for they frequently proved to be trigger-happy. In Chicago alone, Prohibition agents gunned down twenty-three innocent civilians in just over a decade.
