Source G is part of a letter from the Home Secretary to the Mile End Vigilance Committee. This source shows that the police didn’t offer rewards to people who gave information about criminals. “The practice of offering reward for the discovery of criminals was discontinued some years ago because experience showed that such offers of reward tended to produce more harm than good.” This was because people who hadn’t actually seen anything would make up something so that they could claim the reward. People were angry at the Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, because an accomplice of the Ripper wouldn’t have any incentive to identify the Ripper. However, it wasn’t the police’s decision to not offer rewards. It was the Home Secretary, Henry Matthew’s decision to not offer rewards.
The police would put up notices asking for information about the Ripper. They would take statements from witnesses and then follow up on this. The problem with this is that witness statements tended to be contradictory and didn’t identify conclusively what the Ripper looked like.
The police also did door-to-door enquiries to ask people for information. The problem with this is that Whitechapel was a rough area at the time and was rife with criminals. If a policeman knocked on the door of a criminal, they wouldn’t answer the door and would probably run away.
They would also ask people whether they recognised the handwriting from the “Dear Boss” letter that the police received. The problem with this is that a lot of the population in Whitechapel were illiterate and they wouldn’t have been able to read the letter so it wouldn’t mean anything to them, thus they wouldn’t be able to recognise it.
The police also used information they took from the body of the dead person. They did post-mortems to work out how the person was killed. These post-mortems though are nowhere near as detailed as they are today and didn’t reveal much more than was already known. They did crime-scene drawings and they also photographed the victims and their eyes. These photos were of poor quality and therefore weren’t very useful. The problem with these methods are that they are nowhere near as informative as methods are today. They also collected evidence from the area surrounding the crime scene. This is how they found the “bloody apron”. During the 19th Century only a few photographs were taken, but now up to a hundred are taken for further analysis. Although the police found the “bloody apron”, they couldn’t take a sample of the blood for analysis or run it for fingerprints. All this told them was which way the Ripper headed after committing the murder.
The police used bloodhounds to try and track down the Ripper. The bloodhounds also didn’t work because they got lost in the fog and managed to track down their owners instead of the Ripper.
The police put more patrols in place after the murders. Although this delayed the Ripper murdering between the 8th and 27th September 1888, he still murdered again. They also used plain-clothed officers to try to catch him. The problem with this is that a plain-clothed officer couldn’t ask too many questions without arousing suspicion with the public. The Ripper could always kill a plain-clothed officer who confronted him and run off without the fear of anyone knowing about the murder until he was found. This delay would give ample time for the Ripper to escape.
They also investigated tip-offs they received from the public. Unfortunately these tip-offs were few and far between because the police weren’t generally trusted. Also, the ones they did receive can’t have been very useful because they never caught the Ripper.
In conclusion, the main ways the police tried to catch Jack the Ripper were by appealing for information from the public and taking evidence from the crime scene. There were various ways the police used the public as a source of information: putting out notices appealing for information, taking statements from witnesses, door-to-door enquiries and asking whether people recognised handwriting. The methods used to gather evidence from the crime scene were correct but due to the lack of technology, these methods didn’t gather very much information.
