What SHOULD the police have done?

[protohistorian]

Hello Phil, is there a way of narrowing down the pub owners? There are 60 of them in the area bounded by the Macnaghten sequence. Dave

[DVV]

Unless of course one harks back to " ahh, but there is so much stuff missing..." which is as a reason or excuse, becoming a bit of a worn out record, in my opinion.

Phil

Well said, Phil !

Amitiés
David

[DVV]

DVV wrote:
I'd be glad to know at what time Fleming and Hutch went back to the VH on...let's say 8 Sept, 30 Sept, 9 Nov.
You might want to add Barnett to that list.

Hello Maria

not sure. Barnett has logically been suspected and cleared.

Amitiés
David

[Phil Carter]

Hello c.d.,

Yes, I agree with this as well. It wouldn't have hurt by trying. Add to that list the pub owners too.

best wishes

Phil

[Phil Carter]

DVV wrote:
I'd be glad to know at what time Fleming and Hutch went back to the VH on...let's say 8 Sept, 30 Sept, 9 Nov.
You might want to add Barnett to that list.

Hello David, Maria,

Good suggestions each. I believe that if one was to carefully look at the things missing from the police "routine investigation" methods, there are obvious examples here and there of a lack of thorough work.
Unless of course one harks back to " ahh, but there is so much stuff missing..." which is as a reason or excuse, becoming a bit of a worn out record, in my opinion.

best wishes

Phil

[Phil Carter]

I agree with this.

Questioning prostitutes concerning the night of Chapman's murder may have garnered clues. Theres a good chance the killer spent most of that night/morning trolling around for prostitutes. A few had a lucky escape I think.

Hello Jason,

We do not often agree, but that comment at the end of your posting is insightful, imho. That really is food for thought.

best wishes

Phil

[mariab]

DVV wrote:
I'd be glad to know at what time Fleming and Hutch went back to the VH on...let's say 8 Sept, 30 Sept, 9 Nov.
You might want to add Barnett to that list.

[jason_c]

I would say try to work with the prostitutes more. Maybe spread some money around in an attempt to get information.

c.d.

I agree with this.

Questioning prostitutes concerning the night of Chapman's murder may have garnered clues. Theres a good chance the killer spent most of that night/morning trolling around for prostitutes. A few had a lucky escape I think.

[DVV]

More attention to the common lodging houses, imo. Deputies should have noted the name of people coming and going.
I'd be glad to know at what time Fleming and Hutch went back to the VH on...let's say 8 Sept, 30 Sept, 9 Nov.

[c.d.]

I would say try to work with the prostitutes more. Maybe spread some money around in an attempt to get information.

c.d.

[Abby Normal]

Hello all,

The police didn't catch Jack the Ripper. In one way or another, thousands afterwards have tried to catch him. So what should the police have done that they didn't do to catch him? Given that we cannot do anything that was not possible at the time. What strategy? What ideas would you have if YOU were the man in charge ?(No, you don't have to have a personality like Anderson by the way). What would YOU have put in place or into practice?

I look forward to the variation in answers!

best wishes

Phil

They should have tried to engage the killer in an in/direct dialogue, maybe via the papers, to draw him out perhaps or maybe appease him.

[Defective Detective]

The one thing that I can think of which should have been done but wasn't has nothing to do with the immediate investigation. It has to do with Lusk and the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee.

There's a reason that modern police don't entrust criminal investigations to deputized civilians. Vigilantes have a bad habit of fouling up an investigation, injecting their untrained opinions and prejudices into them or, in some cases, directly contaminating crime scenes. While I believe that Lusk and his men had perfectly altruistic motives, what would have been more profitable than allowing them to form the Committee would have been to respond to their initial concerns and put more plainclothesmen at work patrolling the streets at night. Surely there was enough public hue-and-cry by the time of the Double Event to justify it even to posh Charles Warren. And the manpower could have been had, if there had been an actual will to do it.

In other words: fewer vigilantes, more undercover policemen. Two specimens of each may be doing the exact same work in perfectly parallel roads at the same time of night, but the latter will be more effective every single time.

As for the investigation proper? I hardly see what could have been done better than was done without the benefit of hindsight. The Goulston Street Graffito hadn't been connected to the murders, and so, despite my opinion of Warren otherwise, his actions with regards to it are at least intelligible. Mostly I'd just like to have more photographs of the victims in situ, because the pictures of the only victim to have been captured thus look to have been shoddy even when they were perfectly new.

[mariab]

An important reason the Ripper was not caught was the too short time frame in which the murders occurred. I assume that, had he continued killing over several years, he would have been caught.

[protohistorian]

Of this I am uncertain Jason. Maybe one of our fellow scholars will tell us. Pool removal would certainly be counter to established Victorian conceptions of right and wrong. Depending on the modality chosen, it could border on immoral to the Victorian mind. Dave

[jason_c]

With a worldview dominated by thinking like 'people in a social class all behave the same', or 'those poor all manifest similar traits', and 'whatever happens is God's will', the Victorians were very poorly equipped conceptually for the reality of certain people (for varied reasons) hunt other people. They had no effective frame of reference for this. They could not even see these events as requiring three basic elements, a killer, a victim, and a space to interact. If they had grasped this much they would have realized that the only variable they could influence is the space of interaction. The victorian mind however saw more police as the answer and not the removal of the victim pool. Removal of the victim pool would require seeing the victims as humans, and even more repugnant than that, excepting the activity of prostitution as created by the victorian legal system as the genisis of the observable victim pool. In short, they would have to accept certain very dearly held beliefs as contributing factors. If all is God's will, and God says prostitution is wrong, the self righteous would never except such a proposition of reality. Dave

Wasnt Anderson criticized for trying to remove the victim pool?