Originally posted by The Rookie Detective
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I don’t think that it’s the case that we can assume that those senior police officers were particular hampered by their lack of understanding of psychopathy, although any advance in knowledge would have been advantageous to them of course. When the police did a house-to-house searches they weren’t necessarily looking for a raving lunatic; they were looking for men who could come and go unnoticed, who could change bloodied clothing and who might even have been protected by family/friends. It seems that Anderson’s opinion came about as a result of these searches; he didn’t set out believing that the killer was specifically a Jewish madman. He believed, rightly or wrongly, that one of the reasons that the killer hadn’t been caught might have been because he was being shielded and he felt that, a) the killer came from the lower classes and was a local man, and b) the lower class Jews were even more likely to shield ‘one of their own.’
Stewart Evans has suggested that as a result of this search the police would have had a list of men fitting the above criteria and then, when Kosminski was incarcerated he was brought to the attention of the police who found that this man was also on their list. Scott Nelson has suggested two other possible triggers for the police’s interest on Kosminski, a) the GSG, giving a pointer to a rough area where the killer lived, and b) Kosminski’s threatening of his sister with a knife. It’s easy to see how the family might have considered this a ‘final straw’ moment.
No one could doubt that prejudice existed but we also have to remember how much pressure the Police were under to get the ripper off the streets. How many reputations (and careers) were on the line? Would they really have jeopardised their chances of catching their man if they narrowed sights to obviously insane Jews?
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