Senior Police Official Under Investigation Over Alleged Retaliatory Personnel Action After Employee Refused Meal Ticket

[Anchor]

A senior police official is currently undergoing an internal inspection over allegations that he took retaliatory personnel action against a subordinate employee following a conflict over cafeteria meal tickets. The official has explained that the personnel decision was made after comprehensively considering various circumstances.

Reporter An Huijae has the exclusive report.

[Reporter]

This is a police station cafeteria in the metropolitan area.

Exclusively for employees, the cafeteria had been suffering from chronic deficits when Senior Superintendent Kim, who assumed office as the chief of the police station last year, pushed to introduce a new meal ticket system to resolve the issue.

The plan was to boost usage rates by discarding existing meal tickets purchased by employees and setting expiration dates.

The price of the meal tickets was raised slightly, and a fixed amount was set to be deducted from salaries every month. However, problems arose during the process of obtaining employee consent.

Complaints were raised questioning whether they had to buy the tickets even if they had hundreds of existing meal tickets left or if they did not use the cafeteria due to external duties.

Inspector A, an investigation team leader, also expressed that he did not need them since he rarely used the cafeteria, and the responsible department even explained that it could depend on personal preference. However, an unexpected incident occurred shortly afterward.

During a personnel committee meeting early this year, Senior Superintendent Kim brought up Inspector A and instructed, "I cannot work with someone who rebels against the chief," and "Tell him to choose either the intoxicated person protection center or a district unit."

According to SBS coverage, another official tried to dissuade him by saying, "Let's give him a chance to work even as an investigation team member," but Senior Superintendent Kim dismissed it, stating, "I don't want to work with him."

Inspector A, whose position was changed to a district unit patrol team member right after the meeting, immediately took a leave of absence.

A police official stated that there was an internal atmosphere that "it was a retaliatory personnel action for rebelling against the measure he pushed forward."

An internal whistleblower report was filed through the e-People portal last month, and the Korean National Police Agency launched an inspection half a year after the personnel measure.

An official from the Korean National Police Agency stated, "Suspicious circumstances were caught in the overall personnel measures," and added, "We plan to directly investigate Senior Superintendent Kim soon."

Senior Superintendent Kim, who recently moved to the Korean National Police Agency, explained to reporters that while his remarks at the time may have been subject to misunderstanding, "It was a judgment made as an appointing authority, comprehensively considering Inspector A's usual attitude and other factors. There was no abuse of power, violation of regulations, or arbitrary personnel management."

(Camera: Lee Sang-hak, Video Editing: Kim Jong-mi)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.