If the police new the streets and alleys better they may have had someone near to hear or see one of these incidences, but truth be known they didn't. They didn't have enough police officers to be in all these places either, it was estimated that each place was only passed once every ten minutes. This gave Jack the Ripper enough time to get a prostitute into a dark, hidden place and kill her before the officer comes past again. Overall the police force wasn't very well organised nor were they very well trained, there was a lack of detectives. There were no policewomen at this time, this brought up a problem when one of the detectives had an idea to dress officers to look like prostitutes. As you can imagine they wouldn't have looked the most convincing prostitutes ever, but if they would have had policewomen then they may have pulled off there plan.
The police were now stuck, they couldn't find Jack the Ripper because of there lack of forensics and all the false leads the police were getting completely put off track. The police wanted to put out a reward for information about Jack the Ripper but the Home Secretary refused and said although the metropolitan police force were investigating it they weren't going to put up a reward because they thought they would just get more false leads from people who wanted a bit of money. They spent valuable time looking into Leather Apron, who was thought to of been the serial killer, but he had alibis for all but one of the murders. The person could have looked like anything, because a lot of the statements people gave in were false and even what some reporters in the press said he looked like or giving them misleading information.
The press were one of the main ways of spreading the word in those times. Detectives would read these papers to see if there was any valuable information or similar descriptions to theirs in them. This proved in the end to be almost helpless and a waste of time because they were one of the biggest causes of misleading the police over the whole time.
Serial killers are extremely hard to catch because usually they have no pattern for the murders, they are just picked at random. This makes it hard for the police to find a trend or to recognise someone when they have no connection to the people they murder whatsoever. The only way you could catch someone at the time of Jack the Ripper was if you caught them red-handed. Jack the Ripper is known to be very clever, sly, sick minded individual, who new when and where to go to kill his victims.
