The Police - 1 The Beginning Of London’s Police Forces.
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Metropolitan police officers at the time of the Whitechapel murders.
So who was Jack the Ripper?
It is the question that has been asked ever since the year of the murders, 1888. The question has been answered many times. There are countless suggestions that have been made, but none of those suggestions has universal approval. They remain simply guesses.
And the guessing game began right at the beginning of the investigation. The man in charge of the investigation on the ground was Inspector Frederick Abberline, and he said:
“Theories! We were almost lost in theories. There were so many of them.”
When considering the Jack the Ripper murders, it might be worth considering how the police investigated them and how well-equipped they were to handle such an investigation.
Obviously, they lacked much that a modern police force would have at their disposal. Computer technology and forensic science, including the major breakthrough that came with DNA testing, have all been huge gifts to the modern police force.
Back in 1888, the use of fingerprinting in criminal investigations was still more than a decade away. Although fingerprints have been used to identify documents for over two thousand years, they were not used in criminal investigations until 1892.
Juan Vucetich, a police officer in Argentina, had been working on a fingerprinting system. In 1892, he used the bloody fingerprints left at the scene of the murder of two young boys to identify the killer. It was their mother.
In 1897, the Inspector General of the Bengal Police, Sir Edward Henry, developed a fingerprinting system. It was this system that the Metropolitan Police began to use when they founded the Scotland Yard Fingerprinting Bureau in 1901. Two years later, the first British murderers were convicted as a result of fingerprinting evidence.
When the crimes of Jack the Ripper were being investigated, the police couldn’t tell the difference between animal blood and human blood, let alone identify human blood groups.
But were the police guilty of basic human failings?
Did unintentional bias lead to unwarranted assumptions that narrowed their field of investigation? Were they lacking in imagination?
Much detective fiction around the time certainly enjoyed painting the police as dullards who were not quite up to the job.
Much of the entertainment in Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous creation centres around baffled police officers dazzled by the genius of the amateur detective Sherlock Holmes.
Agatha Christie used the same idea with her Miss Marple, who played on her amateur status to outwit the unsuspecting criminal.
Her other super sleuth, Hercule Poirot, ran rings around the Met’s finest. Although, to be fair, he was a retired police officer.
Did the very origins of policing handicap them?
In some form or another, policing has been part of human societies around the world ever since the first kingdoms developed.
In China, India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and the Americas, as people were divided into a ruling class and those who were ruled, then policing to maintain order in these unequal societies became essential.
19th century London was a very unequal society, and the police were at the front line in maintaining order among a population that frequently appeared to be on the brink of outright revolution.
The police had the power to arrest and a monopoly on the legal use of violence.
Inevitably, this power led to corruption and discrimination against certain sectors of society.
The Bow Street Runners
Modern policing in Britain is generally accepted as beginning in 1749 When Henry Fielding founded the Bow Street Runners.
Fielding was a magistrate as well as a writer of fiction, including his novel The History of Tom Jones.
1748 saw the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. After almost a decade of fighting, London’s streets were filled with demobbed soldiers, and a crime wave washed over the capital.
Based at Henry Fielding’s office at 4 Bow Street, the Bow Street Runners worked under and were paid through the magistrate's office. They didn’t patrol the streets but would travel the country, arresting people on the authority of the magistrate.
The rise of the highway robber saw the founding of the Bow Street Horse Patrol in 1763.
In 1798, the Marine Police Force was founded with 220 constables and 1,000 registered dock workers to combat large-scale theft on the River Thames.
Sir Robert Peel
The big changes in policing in London began when Sir Robert Peel became Home Secretary in 1822. He got a bill through Parliament that aimed to create a strong but politically neutral police force to maintain social order.
The ‘Bobby on the Beat’ gets its name from Robert ‘Bobby' Peel. ' Peeler, of course, was an early nickname for a police constable.
The police constables were armed with a wooden truncheon and a wooden rattle to call for assistance. In 1884, the wooden rattle was replaced by a whistle, which could be heard at a greater distance.
Peel wanted the new police force to avoid the charge of being a tool of government repression. He said: “The police are the public and the public are the police”.
Many in society believed that, as Peel intended, the power of the police was built upon trust. Public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour was what policing was really about.
Others argued that the police were simply one part of the apparatus that allowed a ruling class to continue to subjugate the working class.
‘Bloody Sunday’
In 1887, the police of London were about to be confronted by a wave of mass hysteria surrounding the brutal murders of 8 women in Whitechapel. Their work was made more difficult because, on Sunday, November 13 1887, the police lost the trust of much of the population.
An event that became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ certainly strengthened the view that the police were there to suppress the working class when necessary.
On Sunday, November 13, 1887, in Trafalgar Square, the Metropolitan Police, supported by infantry and cavalry, cleared thousands who were demonstrating against the mass unemployment that existed.
This ‘Bloody Sunday’ for the Metropolitan Police meant that “public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour” sank to an all-time low.
In the search for Jack the Ripper, the police needed all the help they could get.
Bloody Sunday's impact on the attitude of many, especially those at the very bottom of society in London’s East End, made that help more difficult to obtain.
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