However, when on 30th May 1884, Fenian terrorists succeeded in detonating a bomb directly under the office of Scotland Yard's Special (Irish) Branch, Vincent decided enough was enough and he resigned to pursue a career as a Tory Member of Parliament. This constant turmoil meant that, by the time of the Jack the Ripper murders the individual detectives who worked for the department were severely demoralised.īy 1884 Vincent had decided that his post with the Metropolitan Police offered him little hope for advancement and he had been trying to resign for over a year. The first ten years of the Criminal Investigation Department's existence (1878 - 1888) had been marred by in-fighting, back biting and power struggles between senior officers, Home Office officials and political mandarins. This was a slightly strange arrangement as his underlings were responsible to the Police Commissioner. Vincent was responsible directly to the Home Office and not to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
This new department (which was quickly dubbed the Defective Department and the Criminal Instigation Department by Punch) was put under the command of a vigorous young barrister by the name of Howard Vincent, who was given the title of ‘Director of Criminal Investigations.’Īlthough he wasn't officially called the Assistant Police Commissioner his position meant that he was this in all but name. The overall responsibility for hunting Jack the Ripper fell to the Metropolitan Police’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) which had been founded in April 1878, following a re-organisation of the original Scotland Yard Detective Branch after several detectives had been jailed for being in the pay of a gang of swindlers.
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That morale had already been sapped by a series of squabbles, resignations and general back biting between senior officers and Home Office mandarins that, in the words of one popular publication, had effectively decapitated the detective department at Scotland yard.īut, to chart the course of the police investigation into the Whitechapel Murders, we must first look at the structure of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police, and our story begins in 1878 - ten years before the Jack the Ripper Murders would expose the flaws of those long ago detectives by exposing them to a new type of crime of which they had little understanding. This criticism can have done the morale of the detectives who were carrying out the police investigation into the Jack Ripper murders no good. The press reacted to this lack of co-operation by grubbing around for any morsels of information that they could find and showed their frustration at the police's refusal to share information by subjecting the police to a barrage of criticism. Today the police would utilise the press in an attempt to gain valuable information.īut the attitude of the Victorian Police was to keep journalists at arms length out of a fear that they might reveal their lines of enquiry to the criminal.
In addition the use of the media was not recognised as being a useful means of bringing a killer such as Jack the Ripper to book. MODERN INVESTIGATIVE TECHNIQUES NOT USEDĪnother aspect of the case was that the police who conducted the investigation into the Jack the Ripper murders lacked many of the techniques that their 21st century counterparts would take for granted in a murder investigation of this kind.įingerprinting, Crime Scene Investigation, modern forensics and even Crime Scene photography were simply not used in police investigations at the time of the Jack the Ripper Murders. In addition the murderer was committing his crimes in one of the most crime ridden quarters of Victorian London, where the secrecy of the criminal elements greatly hampered the police as they struggled to find the killer. The detectives who dealt with the investigation into the killings found themselves pitting their wits against a lone assassin who wasn't leaving them any clues to go on. The Jack the Ripper Murders presented the Victorian Police with a type of crime that they had little experience of handling.
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