Explain how the police tried to catch Jack the Ripper.
The police used many
different techniques to catch jack the ripper. But the main problems were that two different forces were trying to catch jack the ripper. The metropolitan police at the time were policing the central area of London and the general police were monitoring the rest of the country. In modern day these forces work together but during this time the whole ideals of a national police force were new and each force was desperate to prove itself above the others.
One of the first priorities of these groups was getting all people of these areas aware of what was going on and when. As there was no television at the time and the newspapers only published information that was guaranteed to sell newspapers the police started handing out there own leaflets regarding the crimes and what people should do if they had any information. As we see in
Source F. As this source was given out from the police the information is very factual and so we normally trust this source. The source details the reader on the 3 murders that has happened so far however there is one floor with this source, the words this source uses such as “supposedly by someone living in whitechappel” this is a very intellectual sentence that people with either no or a small amount of schooling would have struggled to read this.
Another major problem that the 2 different police forces faced on a day to day basis was the hassle and untrusting nature of the general public. Due to the propaganda that had been used on the public when the metropolitan and central police forces were formed they were under the impression that there would be no more major crimes and when this didn’t happen the people developed a general mistrust for these poor people believing that they had been coned. This led to people wishing to take advantage of the situation to gain power, whether that is in the form of a member of parliament, such as the head of the Mile End Vigilance committee, or simply to gain respect in the local communities.
Source G is a letter from the home secretary to the mile end vigilance committee on the 17th of September 1888. The letter discusses how the practise of offering a reward for the discovery of criminals was not used any more because “they tended to produce more harm than good”. This source although is probably accurate because it has come from the office of the home secretary the facts may or may not have been true. However when we look at the amount of false or miss leading information that was recorded during the investigation such as the case of “
leather apron” were the first murder witness reported a man in a leather apron covered in blood. Many butchers were questioned and one man who was only known as “leather apron” because he always walked around wearing one was almost lynched because of a leek from the police force and press saying that there was a large chance that he was the murderer.
Although many people felt that by offering an award extra information may have come in but it was strongly felt that if anyone did have any information the crimes were simply too brutal for anyone who was ever going to come forward not to.
Overall the police used a range of method to try and catch jack the ripper from leafleting to questioning every possible suspect and witness on every detail. And although the police were often criticised for not doing enough they appear to have used most of the facilities at there disposal in dealing with such a unique case.