SEOUL, September 02 (AJP) - South Korea carried out a sweeping reshuffle of senior police officials Tuesday, replacing 14 of the country's 18 regional police chiefs, as public distrust of police investigations deepens over a scandal on Jeju Island involving the false closure of missing-person cases.
The shake-up came before South Korea's 78-year-old Prosecution Service is set to disappear on Oct. 2, adding urgency to questions over how police investigations will be checked under a new criminal justice system that will strip prosecutors of the power to conduct supplementary investigations themselves.
Those concerns have been further fueled by a botched murder investigation in Gwangju.
The scandals have erupted at a particularly sensitive moment for the country's criminal justice system, as the government prepares to dismantle the Prosecution Service, established in 1948, and redistribute its investigative and indictment functions between separate agencies.
Neither case was caused by the prosecution reform itself, and supporters of the overhaul stress that the new system contains mechanisms allowing prosecutors to scrutinize police investigations and demand additional investigative work.
Still, the cases have intensified a broader debate over how police should be checked once prosecutors lose the power to conduct supplementary investigations themselves.
The first controversy centers on Jang Yoon-gi, who was accused of killing a high school girl in Gwangju in May.
Police initially sent the case to prosecutors on a murder charge, but a subsequent prosecutorial investigation led to Jang being indicted on a more serious rape-murder charge. Prosecutors also uncovered circumstances suggesting possible collusion between members of the original police investigation team and Jang's father, himself a police officer, as well as alleged evidence concealment.
The case immediately became ammunition for critics of eliminating prosecutors' supplementary investigative authority, who argued that crucial allegations might never have surfaced without a second layer of investigation.
The second scandal broke on Jeju, where a police officer was arrested after allegedly closing missing-person cases without properly confirming the whereabouts of those reported missing.
Jeju police reviewed 298 missing-person cases the officer had closed while serving on a missing-persons team between March 2025 and July this year and identified 25 additional cases suspected of having been falsely closed.
In 10 of them, the cases were allegedly closed even though police had not contacted the missing people. In another 15, people who were alive were recorded as dead in the police missing-person profiling system. All 25 people identified in the additional review were eventually confirmed to be safe.
The officer told investigators that he had regarded the missing people as ordinary adults who would likely return on their own and that he felt burdened by the work required to keep cases open and hand them over, according to Jeju police.
The revelations followed nationwide outrage over the handling of the disappearance of Jang Mi-ran, 37, whose case was closed only hours after she was reported missing in May after the officer falsely claimed that police had contacted her. She was later found dead. Another missing man whose case was handled by the same officer was also subsequently found dead.
The Democratic Party (DP), however, rejects suggestions that the incidents demonstrate a fundamental flaw in its prosecution reform.
"The Jang Yoon-gi case in Gwangju and the false closure of the missing-person case in Jeju have nothing to do with prosecution reform," Rep. Seo Young-kyo of the ruling DP, chair of the National Assembly's Legislation and Judiciary Committee, said.
"Under the Democratic Party's amendment to the Criminal Procedure Act, if police officers do something wrong, they are punished, and if a police investigation is insufficient, prosecutors can request supplementary investigation," Seo said.
"Police conduct the investigation in the first instance, and prosecutors then request supplementary investigation and review the facts before deciding whether to indict, followed by a trial," she said. "We have designed the system with multiple layers of scrutiny."
The DP's legislation abolishes prosecutors' authority to personally conduct supplementary investigations but retains and strengthens their authority to request that police perform additional investigation.
Under the legislation, police are required to comply with prosecutors' requests for supplementary investigation and report the results, while prosecutors also retain mechanisms to seek corrective measures or reinvestigation.
Critics argue that being able to order police to investigate further is fundamentally different from allowing prosecutors to directly pursue overlooked evidence themselves.
"I have also criticized prosecutors' monopoly over investigative authority, but I oppose completely stripping them of their supplementary investigative authority because that would create another monopoly — a police monopoly over investigations," Yoo Seong-min, a former four-term lawmaker of the main opposition People Power Party (PPP), said.
"Investigative authority is an immensely powerful state power that has a profound impact on people's lives, safety and fundamental rights," Yoo said.
"Police officers have not received the same specialized legal education as prosecutors, so there is a greater possibility of abuse of investigative authority outside the bounds of the law, disregard or distortion of due process, or cases being buried," he said. "The public will bear the consequences."
"The only solution is to restore prosecutors' supplementary investigative authority," Yoo added.
The debate stands in contrast to the U.S. criminal justice system, where prosecutors and law enforcement agencies frequently work together during investigations and prosecutors can demand additional investigation before deciding whether to bring charges.
"In white-collar cases — fraud, corruption, etc. — I can't imagine a prosecutor not being integrally involved in an investigation from the very beginning," said Daniel Richman, the Paul J. Kellner Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and a former federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.
"Generally, in street crime cases, the investigation is largely done by the police," Richman said.
But the relationship changes as cases become more complex.
"For big cases, like homicides, the bigger prosecutors' offices often have their own squads of detectives, since the police's view of what evidence is sufficient may be quite different from a prosecutor's," he said.
Drawing on his experience at the Southern District of New York, one of the United States' most prominent federal prosecutor's offices, Richman said prosecutor involvement from the outset was standard in sophisticated cases.
"In my old office, the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney's Office, which is nationally known for its white-collar expertise, it would be extremely uncommon for a prosecutor not to be involved from the start," he said.
Asked whether American prosecutors have powers comparable to South Korea's concept of supplementary investigation, Richman said they do.
"If a prosecutor thinks the evidence is insufficient to go before a jury, she will almost invariably tell the police that she can't proceed without further investigation, unless she wants to simply decline to prosecute," he said.
U.S. prosecutors also have powerful tools to develop evidence themselves or to direct how evidence is obtained, particularly in federal investigations.
"Prosecutors completely control the grand jury process," Richman said. "Indeed, agents generally, with some exceptions involving administrative subpoenas, lack the legal power to force disclosure of evidence or testimony on their own."
Prosecutors also generally seek search warrants from judges based on information supplied by federal agents, he said.
When prosecutors conclude that a police investigation is inadequate, there is little ambiguity about what they can do.
"They can send the case back, or simply decline to prosecute," Richman said.
Richman placed particular emphasis on the benefits of prosecutors and investigators approaching the same case from different institutional perspectives.
"Each side brings a critical perspective — the police are closer to the facts, the prosecutor is closer to the courts," he said.
"Neither can function without the other, and each can check the other, identifying blind spots, even corruption."
The relationship becomes especially important in complex investigations, Richman said, because U.S. prosecutors exercise control over legal mechanisms that investigators alone cannot deploy.
"Particularly because, in sophisticated cases, prosecutors control important investigative tools — search warrants, grand juries, and the charges that can be used to obtain information from conspirators — complete separation, at least in the U.S., would mean the end of corruption, fraud, and many national security cases," he said.
Richman also pointed beyond the United States, saying other countries have recognized the value of close cooperation between prosecutors and investigators, citing collaboration in rape cases in Britain.
His comments were an explanation of how the U.S. system operates and the risks of completely separating investigation from prosecution, rather than a direct assessment of South Korea's legislation, which preserves prosecutors' power to request additional police investigation.
That distinction is now at the center of Korea's debate: whether the power to review an investigation and send it back to police is sufficient to protect suspects and victims — or whether prosecutors must retain the ability to pursue missing evidence themselves.
With the current Prosecution Service due to disappear on Oct. 2, the Gwangju and Jeju scandals have turned that institutional question into an immediate test of public confidence in Korea's new criminal justice system.
AJP Takeaways
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South Korea’s prosecution reform faces renewed scrutiny after botched police investigations in Gwangju and Jeju raised concerns over how police will be checked once the 78-year-old Prosecution Service is abolished on Oct. 2.
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The ruling Democratic Party says prosecutors will retain strong oversight powers, including the authority to demand supplementary police investigations, while critics argue that requesting further investigation is fundamentally different from prosecutors being able to pursue missing evidence themselves.
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U.S. legal practice offers a contrasting model in which prosecutors and investigators often work closely on complex cases, with Columbia Law School professor and former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman stressing that each side can check the other and identify investigative blind spots or corruption.
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