Jack the Ripper. Describe law and order in London in the late nineteenth century

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  1. Describe law and order in London in the late nineteenth century.

  The Law and Order had significantly improved during the Nineteenth century, although there were still a few problems. The idea of a Police Force had been set up in the beginning of the Nineteenth century; there had been two different police forces in Britain. One was the Bow Street Runners and the other had been the Thames River Police, which just begun two years into settling in. Before 1929, Britain’s towns and cities had been actually patrolled by watchmen and parish constables, this being a good idea, as they knew the area and local people well, still little is known about them. The main turning point came in 1829, when the home secretary, sir Robert Peel set up the Metropolitan Police Force. Peel’s making still survives today and he has left his mark on it. Furthermore, Peel gave the police their nickname. They became known as ‘peelers’ or more commonly known as ‘bobbies’ after their founder.

  A key problem that the Metropolitan Police faced was that the early police recruits had been either unsuitable and unfit, most often due to drunkenness and had soon resigned or been sacked. There was also a lack of training, which made the police’s job not very successful. This had remained a problem throughout the nineteenth century.

  Before 1829 the officers couldn’t really deal with big turbulences like riots and those were common in many parts of Britain. For example in 1780 law and order in London broke down wholly during the Gordon Riots. The rioters had broken into Newgate Jail and attacked the Bank of England. The bank was fortunately saved by the Mayor and the Grenadier Guards.

  In 1819, 50,000 people met at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester to listen to Henry Hunt in an act of kindness to the reform of parliament. The Manchester Magistrates panicked at the sight of the crowd and ordered special constables to arrest Hunt. The magistrates called on the usual army units, which cleared the area rapidly.

  In 1829, probable uncertainty between the police force and the army was a major concern. British people had traditionally always disliked seeing ‘redcoats’ (the colour of the army’s uniform) on streets. As the army was used a lot by the government to keep order and suppress popular demonstrations it wasn’t trusted. Conversely the navy had a ‘hero’ status as the defenders of Britain. Therefore blue was more of an adequate colour. So, the Metropolitan Police Force was given a blue uniform. The bobbies had been armed with a ‘truncheon’ although the constables had the right to carry cutlasses, but firearms had been forbidden at first.

  The new police force was mainly unpopular because of its rules of crowd control. The most common method was called the baton charge and this was used in 1833 at   Cold Bath Fields in London. One constable, PC Culley, was killed during the riot. Incidents like this stayed common until the First World War. Another reason was that the Metropolitan Police Force wasn’t used anywhere else in Britain.

  The main role for the police in London was to prevent crime but they also began to try and solve crimes.  The first detectives were from the Metropolitan Police in 1842 however it wasn’t until the 1860s where detective work started to be prepared. Detective methods developed slowly. In 1879 there were 216 detectives and in 1884 the number of detectives increased to 294. In addition to this in 1879 there were 13,128 arrests and in 1884 there were 18,344.  The Detective Department had been re-organised in 1878 and the Criminal Intelligence Department (CID) had now been set up. From doing this we can now see the results of putting on more detectives allowing there to be more criminals caught. The police had learnt the worth of footprints in the early nineteenth century and the standard method in detective work was to go after suspicious characters. This was the same as the techniques used by bobbies.

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  A number of forensic progress was made but in 1884 a man called John Toms was convicted of murder because the torn paper used for his pistol wadding looked the same as the paper left from the wound in the head of his victim. In 1892 a new method of identification was founded, it involved measuring parts of the human body on the theory that no two individuals would be exactly the same. This was called the Alphonse Bertillon method. In 1901 the use of fingerprinting had evolved. The first conviction involving fingerprints was in June 1902. Until this ...

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