How Much Credit to Police?

[Scott Nelson]

Kosminski appears to have first come to the notice of Police when he gave his name as Aaron Kosminski when he was stopped for walking with an unmuzzled dog.

Not before then? Or what about afterwards, which could imply the unmuzzled dog incident had nothing to do with his confinement?

[Kunochan]

I think little enough of policing now, and the Met in 1888 suffered many of the same problems but far worse. These are the people who thought Elizabeth Cass was a prostitute, that foreigners (read: "Jews) were more likely to commit crimes, that murdered unfortunates got what they deserved, that protests should be violently suppressed. Like police today, the police of Whitechapel weren't charged with serving and protecting the people of Whitechapel, but to confine crime to that location to protect the West End. There was little effort to capture "Leather Apron" until forced to do so by the Press and popular opinion.

All that said, none of the sources we have to work with—newspaper reports, police statements, memoirs—are terribly reliable, but that's what we have. I think the most useful documents concern coroners' inquests. We should be suspicious of information from the police, but we can't just discard it. We'd have to discard everything. And as is often pointed out, despite all the faults of Victorian policing, they knew more than we do.