Missed Opportunity to Prevent False Closures 2 Years Ago

[Anchor]

The reason why Officer Bu was able to arbitrarily close and delete the missing person case comes down to poor police systems. However, according to our reporting, system improvement measures such as in-person verification of missing persons had already been proposed two years ago following a murder case. Although the police were fully aware of the problem, they missed the chance to prevent "false closures" on their own.

This is an exclusive report by Reporter Ha Jeongyeon.

[Reporter]

In October 2024, the "Hwacheon Bukhangang murder case" occurred, in which active-duty military officer Yang Gwang-jun murdered a female military civilian employee, mutilated her body, and abandoned it.

[(Do you have anything to say to the victim?) ......]

Yang Gwang-jun, who was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment, attempted to cancel a missing person report at the time of the incident by calling the police, mimicking a woman's voice and pretending to be the victim. Controversy erupted when it was revealed that the police simply accepted that the call belonged to the victim, even though they had recorded the caller's gender as male.

This is an internal document titled "Measures to Improve the Missing Persons Investigation System" prepared by the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency after analyzing the case in November of the same year.

It notes that safety should have been directly verified through reliable means such as face-to-face contact, but the missing person case was closed solely based on the reporter's intent; there was no verification or approval process by a supervisor in the system; and the process for closing missing person reports was also inadequate.

Improvement measures regarding the closure of missing person reports, such as "must directly meet and verify the missing person," were included. In particular, it was revealed that improvement plans for the "Missing Persons Profiling System"—which emerged as a critical loophole in the recent "Jeju missing person false closure case"—had already been recommended to the National Police Agency at that time.

The proposals suggested that requesting the cancellation of a missing person report should require a supervisor's approval process, reliable safety verification procedures should be carried out, and the reasons should be documented.

There was also a proposal to add a "system pop-up feature" to check whether safety had been verified face-to-face.

Measures such as the supervisor approval process are included in the countermeasures recently announced by the police following the Jeju incident, meaning there was already an opportunity to fix the issue two years ago.

The National Police Agency explained that although it planned to rebuild the system reflecting the recommendations at the time, only budget for design was secured, and it plans to push for a budget increase this year.

(Camera: Kim Yong-woo | Video Editing: So Ji-hye)

※