Another big change happened in 1858, when the first horse drawn police vans were bought in. These vans had separate locked cubicles, used for the transportation of several prisoners. They were nicknamed “Black Maria”. The origin of this nickname is believed to have come from the Midlands, (Manchester and Bolton) where drunks were removed from the streets and placed into a lodging house which was owned by someone called Maria.
In 1879 a law was passed saying that at a scene of a murder the victims’ body must not be disturbed in any way and the surroundings must be kept clear of prying pedestrians. This didn’t really work because when Jacks’ victims were found there were more pedestrians on the scene than policemen!
In 1894, the Alphonose Bertillon System of identification came into operation this included fingerprinting which was pretty useless at the time as there were no records to match them against. Some other methods in this system was an assortment of measuring equipment used to measure the remains of people.
Some 4 years after the last milestone in detective work another breakthrough came up. The police were armed with revolvers to protect themselves from dangerous people paroling the streets. This was also a great achievement for the CID as they could use the guns to follow up leads and threaten to kill the culprit if they didn’t obey. The revolvers were also a good way to control crowd trouble because not many people, as today, want to be on the wrong end of a handgun.
This shows us that the police force were going through great change after Jack The Ripper walked the streets of London. This, I think was mainly due to the Ripper himself as I think that they were greatly influenced by the way he captured and killed his victims without anybody seeing him.
Question 2
The Jack the Rippers’ murders attracted so much attention because everyone in Whitechapel, a poor area of London, passed news around that a murder has been committed. An example of when this happened was after the Annie Chapman murder when the people who lived opposite the murder scene in Hanbury Sreet rented out their balconies to passer-by’s who were intrigued to know what is happening. This wasn’t a good thing for the police as this put pressure on them to crack the case quicker otherwise if there was another murder (as there was) these crowds would persist and follow them everywhere and make gestures at them saying that they cant catch the Ripper. In particular, the Newspapers were quick to make news out of the murders and criticise their lack of success.
One of the main reasons that the Ripper murders attracted so much attention was because they happened in a poor area of London. Whitechapel. Why there was so much attention of the murders is pretty obvious when you think about it and study all of the evidence that there is for this topic. Why they attracted so much attention was because most people in the Whitechapel district had no jobs to occupy them during the day. When they were on the streets looking for food to feed their ever-growing families they used to follow the crowd to see if they were gathering around a rich man giving out money or food. But instead they were looking at a dead body that had been brutally mutilated and was being examined by the police to try and find clues to catch the murderer.
To be fair, the police were climbing a burning rope as they never got close enough to find the Ripper but they always managed to humiliate themselves to anybody who read the comics in the newspapers or watched it happen. This wasn’t good publicity for the police as the Ripper could be reading about the murders’ in the paper and what the police are doing next. This then left a window open in the case for the Ripper to climb through and start all over again.
Question 3
The police force in London, as I already have mentioned, was very poor in number and in general as they could not hold back mass rioters or crack murder cases. This, therefore, made it easier for any sick minded person to go on a killing spree like someone did in 1888. Jack the Ripper.
Out of the five murders that are believed to be Jacks’ victims, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddows and Mary Jane Kelly, only four of them actually happened in Whitechapel which was a division of the Metropolitan Police Force. The murder that wasn’t committed in Whitechapels’ was that of Catherine Eddows who was murdered in City which has a different police force than the rest of London (called City of London police) but they still let the Metropolitan Police Force take up the leads.
Even though Jack the Ripper was never caught, some theories suggest that he was captured by the police and locked up in a secure place and dealt with accordingly. I personally believe that this is very unlikely as I believe that Jack was to clever to be caught as patterns appeared in his work. He was always leaving clues behind that suggested that he was a butcher, a doctor etc. in the end, the police had summed up that he had about 5 different professions. Also, the police force didn’t really have the men to go out and follow up all the leads and by the time they moved to the next lead it was too late as the evidence that was needed to follow the leads up were gone. This, therefore, left the police without a leg to stand on. They had to wait for the Ripper to strike again before they got any closer to catching him. This proves that the police at the time were ill-equipped to deal with a serial killer investigation.
By looking at modern serial killer cases, such as the Yorkshire Ripper, 1970s-80s, the murderers tend to attract very little attention to themselves and try to frame others while they hunt down their next victim. By looking at the evidence, Jack the Ripper could have been the original of this tactic which is still popular today.
If the police had had the investigative procedures such as fingerprinting, this was first used in 1901, or DNA matching, first used in 1987, in 1888, at their disposal then Jack would’ve most certainly been caught. How the police worked in the 1880s’ is very different today. If you didn’t have the person doing the crime at the scene of the crime then there was almost no chance of catching him.
Going back to what I had said earlier, the police mainly followed the big leads that suggested that the Ripper was either a horse slaughterer or a butcher. That was probably the biggest mistake the police did in trying to capture him and they kept on doing it again and again. The Ripper was leading the investigation for his neck himself as he had the police following up leads that lead to dead ends. This then resulted in the police arresting the wrong people like the three horse slaughterers who were caught and believed to be the murderers but they all had an alibi to prove that they were working the night that Jack struck again.
This, naturally, made the police unpopular as they were arresting anyone who looked like they fit in to be the murderer instead of checking further like following him to see how he or she behaves when they are around women. Looking at the evidence for and against the police they were digging a hole and falling in deeper and deeper.
