Why were the police unable to catch Jack the Ripper?
Jack the ripper was a brutal, motiveless and the first serial murderer who roamed the streets of East London at night preying on prostitutes who to this day is unknown. In this essay I am going to try and explain the factors that prevented the police from catching him. There were general problems with policing, problems with crimes and how they were controlled and there was a vast amount of pressure on the police from different sources such as the general public, the press, the government and from their own false leads.
Firstly the police held a terrible reputation with Londoners in the East End. As they believed that the Metropolitan police who was a fairly new organisation was more concerned in helping the high class in the West end and ignoring the issues of the poor.
The police was also more concerned in preventing crime than in actually solving the existing crimes. This led the people to loose believe in the power of the police. They also had limited resources; they did not have the right equipment as things as DNA were not know of yet they could not find out Jack’s identity from blood left on his victims or forensic evidence. The metropolitan police also had limited techniques for example they would think that if they looked in the retina of the victim they would see the face of the murderer, but of course this never worked. In one occasion Sir Charles warren ordered the writing on a wall made from blood to be washed off as it made a racist remark blaming the Jews for the Ripper murders and they thought that this remark would raise riots and conflict between the Jews and everyone else and had this not been done they could have recognised the ripper’s writing.
