Calls are growing for enhanced internal and external oversight of police investigations following a false closure of missing person reports in Jeju. With the abolition of prosecutors' supplementary investigation rights next month, there is a pressing need for a system to filter out inadequate investigations.
The Jeju Police Agency announced on September 1 that it has identified 25 additional cases of suspected false closures and record deletions among 298 missing person cases handled by Officer A from the Jeju Western Police Station.
Of these, 10 cases were found to have been closed with false information without confirming the safety of the missing individuals. The remaining 15 cases involved confirming the individuals' whereabouts but entering false reasons such as 'traffic accident death' or 'sudden death' into the profiling system, leading to record deletions. All 25 missing persons have been confirmed to be safe.
On the same day, police transferred Officer A, who is facing charges of dereliction of duty, to prosecutors. Officer A is accused of misleading the reporting parties into believing that safety had been confirmed for a 30-year-old woman and a 60-year-old man after receiving their missing person reports on May 30 and July, respectively. Both individuals were later found deceased.
During police questioning, Officer A stated, "I thought the missing persons were typical adults and took it lightly. I felt burdened by the amount of work I had to hand over, so I falsely closed the cases."
An analysis by five psychological analysts indicated that the primary motive for the misconduct stemmed from accumulated work pressure and fatigue. No external motivations such as financial gain or hostility toward the missing persons were identified. Police concluded that Officer A's evasive behavior and irresponsible attitude contributed to the offenses.
However, despite categorizing the motive as an individual deviation, structural flaws in the case handling process were revealed. The missing persons unit at the Jeju Western Police Station consists of only four officers, and Officer A was on solo night duty every four days. At that time, there was no procedure for immediate verification or approval from a supervisor when an officer independently closed a case in the system.
The mechanism for cross-referencing records from different police databases also failed to function properly. Officer A recorded in the 112 emergency call system that contact had been made with the missing person, but entered 'traffic accident victim' in the profiling system. Both records indicating the individual was alive and deceased remained, but police failed to notice this discrepancy.
Officer A reportedly deleted related records from the profiling system out of fear that the false closure of the case would be discovered. In the case of the 60-year-old man, Officer A decided to leave the record as 'location found' because another staff member was aware of the report and believed that deleting it would lead to detection.
Even after the family of the woman filed another missing person report, police did not realize for about a month that the previous records had been deleted. It was only after the police agency's relevant department checked the deletion history through the system management company that the Jeju police were informed of the situation.
To prevent recurrence, police have decided to conduct a comprehensive review of approximately 310,000 closed missing person cases from the past three years and to generally prohibit non-face-to-face closures. They will implement a procedure to directly confirm the safety of missing persons and require the criminal division chief to review objective materials before approving case closures. Until a management approval function is added to the system, closed cases will be managed using manual logs.
The challenge remains whether internal reviews alone can adequately filter out inadequate cases as police powers expand. Starting October 2, the abolition of prosecutors' direct supplementary investigation rights means that police will handle investigations from initiation to closure and supplementary investigations for general criminal cases. Prosecutors can request supplementary investigations but cannot directly investigate to address deficiencies.
A dedicated organization for crimes against vulnerable populations will be established within the Serious Crime Investigation Agency. However, the local branches of this agency will be limited to six locations: Seoul, Suwon, Daejeon, Daegu, Busan, and Gwangju. The dedicated organization will primarily focus on crimes against vulnerable populations, such as child abuse and sexual offenses, making it difficult to view it as an external oversight body for all police cases.
Legal experts are calling for measures to enhance the effectiveness of supplementary investigation requests and to strengthen external review and investigation deliberation processes for non-prosecution cases.
In a survey of 403 members of the Lawyers for a Democratic Society, 67% responded that prosecutors' supplementary investigation rights should be fully or partially maintained. Among those who believe the abolition of supplementary investigation rights is necessary, 78.3% identified the need to enhance the effectiveness of the supplementary investigation request system as a necessary measure.
The Jeju police have referred the additional 25 confirmed cases to the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crime Investigation Unit for further investigation. They plan to expand the scope of the investigation to include cases supported by the criminal team before Officer A was assigned to the missing persons unit. Establishing a control system that can promptly identify and correct not only individual deviations by police officers but also improper case handling is a pressing task.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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