Rushing Out Measures After the Fact... Missing the 'Basics' Yet Again

[Anchor]

It is hardly new for police to face criticism over poor initial responses to missing person cases. While countermeasures have poured out every time a controversy arises, manuals were ignored once again this time.

Reporter Kim Minjun has the story.

[Reporter]

The missing person case of the so-called Daegu "Frog Boys," whose remains were found 11 years later, and the disappearance of Song Hye-hee in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, in 1999, both drew criticism that police dismissed them as simple runaways and failed to actively conduct initial searches.

Although the enactment of a law in 2005 imposed an obligation on police to "swiftly conduct initial searches" for missing children, two elementary school students in Anyang, Gyeonggi Province, went missing and were later found murdered in 2007. The following year, the police announced they would establish dedicated missing persons investigation teams at frontline police stations nationwide.

When the 2017 middle school girl murder and body abandonment case involving Lee Young-hak, dubbed the "Molar Daddy," broke out, the police required all missing person cases to be reported to the division head, and even to the chief of the police station if a connection to crime was suspected.

However, at the time of Go Yu-jung's murder of her ex-husband in 2019, the police judged it more likely to be a simple runaway case of an adult male rather than a crime, and the investigation only began in earnest after the bereaved family directly secured and submitted on-site footage.

As a result, the police overhauled their missing persons investigation manual once again in 2020, which has been in use until now.

The manual obtained by SBS dictates that a case should be closed only after meeting the missing person face-to-face, and if face-to-face contact is refused, safety must be verified through video calls or other means. However, in these recent cases of false closures, the manual became useless as police officers surnamed Bu and Gyeong processed the cases entirely through lies.

Although regulations mandated holding a response meeting hosted by the division head if the whereabouts are not confirmed within 12 hours of receiving a report, managers were not even aware of the false reports made by officer Bu.

Once again, the police are hastily preparing measures to ban investigators from independently closing cases or closing missing person cases "non-face-to-face" within the missing person management system.

Given that the countermeasures poured out every time a missing person case occurred were not properly observed, it seems difficult to recover the plummeted trust unless the measures put forward by the police this time lead to the establishment of an effective system.

(Video reporting: Seol Chi-hwan, Video editing: So Ji-hye, Design: Seo Hyun-jung)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.