The National Police Agency took four officers off duty on the 25th over the missing-person cases a sergeant in Jeju is accused of closing with false entries. The four are the posts above him: the former head of Jeju Western Police Station, the current head, the current head of the criminal investigation division, and the leader of the missing-persons team. Both station chiefs are on the list because the case arrived in May and the post changed hands in the regular June rotation, 헤럴드경제 reports.
The agency's inspection office said the same day that it had opened an inquiry — not into the sergeant, but into how the case was handled and into the chain of supervision as a whole.
That is a wider frame than the one the case started in, and the president used the day's cabinet meeting to press it further. 이데일리 reports him saying that the police are an organisation in which the chain of command matters greatly, and asking what a chain of command is for if a failure by a front-line officer ends with the front-line officer being punished. Authority to command, he said, comes with a matching responsibility. He also said that problems grow when power is concentrated, that the same failure has a larger effect when the powers are larger, and that responsibility has to be strengthened in proportion — remarks 이데일리 reads as aimed at the investigative powers moving to the police. He asked the prime minister's office to gather public views on how to proceed.
The interior minister had already apologised. 헤럴드경제 quotes him saying the police failed to do their job and a life that could have been protected was lost, and that he was deeply sorry to the family.
The procedural change is small and immediate. Closing a missing-person case had required no separate approval. The acting commissioner general told the National Assembly's public administration committee on the 24th that until the system is rebuilt, closures are to be signed off by hand by a team leader and a division head.
The criminal track moved in the other direction on the same day. The Jeju District Court granted the sergeant's challenge to his emergency arrest and ordered him released, on the ground that his whereabouts were known and there had been time to obtain a warrant — a ruling about the arrest, not about the four counts he faces, which include dereliction of duty and forgery and use of official electronic records. Prosecutors applied for a warrant at about noon on the 24th, and the hearing was set for the afternoon of the 25th.
One new number came with the day. 헤럴드경제 reports that of the 298 missing-person reports the sergeant handled, about ten were cleared from the national missing-persons profiling system for reasons resembling the one in this case.
Why it is on the board
The strongest video signal in the Korean lens when we collected — a breaking clip at 52,636 views an hour — with the case also on 헤럴드경제's and 이데일리's most-read lists.
Six of the 35 items on the Korean reading list are this case, against eight of thirty when we collected yesterday. Three of today's six are 이데일리's, and they are three different stories: the president's remarks, a former legislator's caution against concluding anything about the cause of death, and the partner's account. The remaining three are 조선일보's, 한국경제's and 헤럴드경제's.
확인: 헤럴드경제 · 헤드라인제주 · 이데일리