History (Whitechapel)

• Rookeries: Areas filled with lodging houses e.g. Flower & Dean Street
• Charles Booth - a social reformer who studied the living conditions of the poor in London and made maps showing his findings
• Flower and Dean Street: Haunt of thieves, prostitutes and seen as "lower class, vicious and semi-criminal"
• Workhouses were a last resort for the poor, they were like modern-day prisons and controlled the food you ate, the work you did and split up families, allowing them to only see each other once per day
• Peabody Estate was a block of flats built that were very pleasant compared to the houses in Whitechapel, it had good ventilation and lice couldn't live in the walls. However, rent was too high for the majority of people.
• Residuum: Natural criminals that were born to steal, lie and rob.
• Worries of anarchism and socialism: Fenian Irish Nationalists and Worker's Friend newspaper made by Jewish immigrants
• Alcoholism: High level of drinking, criminals and victims often drunk
• Metropolitan Police set up by home secretary Robert Peel in 1829. People were sceptical and saw them as an infringement into liberty
• Bow Street Runners were private detectives who worked with the government to catch criminals
• The Thief Taker General was a man named Jonathan Wild who would sell information about thieves to the Bow Street Runners but also ran his own gang of thieves
• Policing methods included foot patrols, plain clothes officers and police stations
• In 1867, the police's reputation was weakened when police ignored warnings about Fenians planting a bomb in Clerkenwell.
• Sir Charles Rowan was the first commissioner but died in 1852 and was replaced by Richard Mayne. Henderson became a commissioner in 1870. In 1886, Henderson resigned after a Trafalgar Square protest got out of hand and Charles Warren replaced him. Warren resigned a year later after criticising the home secretary. James Munro took his place.
• Investigation techniques improve: 1894 saw new identification tactics like photos, measurements and mugshots. in 1901, fingerprinting was introduced.
• Whitechapel came under the H division. It had 505 policemen over the 176,000 people who lived there in 1885
• Each division was run by a Superintendent Constable.
• The main tactic to prevent crime was The Beat - each constable would patrol a specific area and was timed precisely. It was half an hour during the day and fifteen minutes at night, so criminals would have less time to commit crime at night. After a month, they would be moved to a different area to prevent corruption. However, criminals would memorise beat patterns.
• Detectives worked in plain clothes, supervised prisoners that had been released early on good behaviour. Their main objective was to observe and gather information.
• The main difficulties in policing were:

  1. Alcohol - made it more dangerous for police
  2. Gangs - Ran unlicensed boxing matches and threatened Jewish business owners.
  3. Prostitution - For many women it was a desperate measure to earn money and made women vulnerable
  4. Immigration - Tension between Jewish immigrants as stories focused on stereotypes of greed of Jewish criminals
• The Ripper Murders

  1. Mary Nichols, 31 Aug
  2. Annie Chapman, 8 Sep
  3. Elizabeth Stride & Catherine Eddowes, 30 Sep
  4. Mary Kelly, 9 Nov