Exclusive: The Missed Opportunity 2 Years Ago That Could Have Prevented 'False Closures'

[Anchor]

Officer Boo was able to arbitrarily close and delete the missing person case due to the police's flawed system. However, according to our reporting, system improvement measures such as in-person verification of missing persons were already proposed two years ago following a murder case. Even after identifying the problems, the police missed the opportunity to prevent "false closures" on their own.

Exclusive reporting by Ha Jeongyeon.

[Reporter]

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

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

Yang Gwang-jun, whose life sentence was finalized, attempted to cancel a missing person report during the incident by calling the police and imitating a woman's voice to pretend to be the victim. Controversy arose when it was revealed that the police simply accepted the call as belonging to the victim, even though they had recorded the caller's gender as male.

In November of the same year, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency analyzed the case and drafted an internal document titled "Measures to Improve the Missing Persons Investigation System."

The document noted that direct safety verification should have been conducted through reliable means such as in-person contact, but the missing person case was closed solely based on the reporter's intent, there was no manager verification or approval procedure in the system, and the process for closing missing person reports was inadequate.

Improvement measures for closing missing person reports, such as "missing persons must be directly met and verified," were included. In particular, ways to improve the "missing person profiling system," which turned out to be a critical flaw in the recent "Jeju false missing person case closure," were already proposed to the Korean National Police Agency at that time.

The proposal suggested that requesting the cancellation of a missing person report should require a manager's approval process, reliable safety verification procedures, and the recording of reasons for closure.

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

Measures such as the manager approval process are included in the countermeasures recently announced by the police in the wake of the Jeju case, meaning there was already an opportunity to fix the system two years ago.

The Korean National Police Agency explained that it had planned to rebuild the system by reflecting the suggestions at the time, but only secured design budget, and that it would push for a budget increase this year.

(Camera: Kim Yong-woo | Video Editing: So Ji-hye)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.