[Editorial] Police bury cases

Given the recent police misconduct involving officers quietly burying cases at an early stage, having suspects treated as witnesses, and helping to destroy key evidence, it is astonishing that the police can still claim to be on the front line of public safety.

With the revised Criminal Procedure Act set to take effect on Oct. 2, public anxiety over the police’s impending monopoly over investigative authority is bound to grow.

A police officer at Jeju Seobu Police Station in Jeju City, who is accused of deceiving the family of 37-year-old Jang Mi-ran and falsely closing her missing person case, has been found to have deliberately mishandled another missing person case in the same fashion.

On Saturday, police were searching for Jang after discovering her case was closed prematurely and found the body of a man whose disappearance had been first reported to police 51 days earlier.

On July 2, the police officer who falsely closed Jang's case received a missing person report from the man's family. Shortly afterward, he reportedly lied to the family that he had contacted the man. The officer said that the man was safe but did not want his family to know his whereabouts, and then the officer closed the case.

After seeing news reports about Jang's disappearance, the missing man's family again reported his disappearance to police, who later found him dead in the Jeju City area during their search.

Jang is said to have left her home in Hallim-eup, Jeju City, in the early hours of May 13, after which she became unreachable. The same officer, who was on night duty when he received the report that she was missing on May 15, told his superior that he had made contact with her and closed the case that day.

Still, Jang remained out of contact with her family, who filed another missing person report in July. The police have resumed the search, but now, three months after her disappearance, CCTV footage from the area where she was last seen has been deleted, making it difficult to trace her movements. The early closure of the case cost police the golden window for investigating her disappearance.

No record of the phone call with Jang, as claimed by the police officer, has been found, raising suspicions that the claim was fabricated.

The police officer also deleted Jang's case record from the Missing Person Profiling System at his own discretion. The system is an internal police information network that tracks missing person reports, search efforts and results, as well as the grounds for closing cases.

The notion that a single police officer can unilaterally decide the fate of a case involving citizens' lives is simply unacceptable.

The cases might have been solved if the police had responded promptly at the outset and launched investigations immediately after the two disappearances were reported. Moreover, the truth about the cases only began to emerge after the families of the missing persons publicized their disappearances on social media.

In Seoul, the head of the investigation team at Gangnam Police Station was arrested and indicted on suspicion of helping bury a case by having a suspect treated as a witness. The officer allegedly did so at the request of the husband of a well-known Pilates instructor who had been accused of fraud.

In the murder of a high school girl in Gwangju, the father of the killer, an active-duty police officer, obtained confidential investigation information and used it to destroy key evidence.

It is hard not to despair when police officers like this will be entrusted with full investigative authority. The dysfunction in the investigative system shows that similar instances could occur anywhere and at any time.

If this is how police investigations are being handled even now, it is frightening to imagine what may happen after Oct. 2, when prosecutors lose their power to conduct supplementary investigations and the police come to monopolize investigative authority. It could be a lot worse than falsely closing a missing persons case.