President Lee Jae-myung on the 25th instructed the Prime Minister's Office to gather public opinion and draw up a plan to establish a police reform body, telling a Cabinet meeting, "I want you to consider how to reform the police and to think about a police reform body." He stressed the need to overhaul systems and clarify command-chain accountability, noting that "the problem of lax discipline in the police and their irresponsible handling of public-safety cases has emerged as a serious issue." The remarks were sharper in tone than the previous day, when he had called on the police to prepare their own reform plan. Lee issued the warning directly as controversy grew uncontrollably over allegations that the police had downplayed or covered up recent cases, including the murder of a Gwangju high school student by Jang Yoon-gi and the disappearance and death of Jang Mi-ran in Jeju.
The problem is the lack of time to prepare and carry out a reform plan. Only 37 days remain until the revised Criminal Procedure Act, enacted at the ruling party's initiative, takes effect on October 2. Once the law takes effect, prosecutors will be unable to exercise either direct investigative powers or supplementary investigative powers, making it harder to prevent the police from burying cases. Prosecutors may request supplementary investigations, but the police will remain the investigating body, limiting the ability to uncover the truth. Moreover, when the Prosecutors' Office is abolished in October, cases previously handled by prosecutors will be transferred en masse to the police. The police, already struggling to handle their existing caseload, will face an even heavier workload, inevitably leading to more delayed and inadequately handled investigations.
To prevent such chaos in investigations and public safety, the ruling party and the government should first delay the enforcement of the revised Criminal Procedure Act, which they pushed through hastily without sufficient deliberation and preparation. Some in the legal community suggest postponing it by at least a year, using the grace period to improve the system. The most urgent tasks are to create a control mechanism to stop the police from burying cases and to expand the pool of investigators with strong capabilities and integrity. Fundamentally, the police's misuse of investigative powers needs to be checked by measures such as restoring prosecutors' supplementary investigative authority. What is required now is for President Lee to take responsibility for resolving the problem he created. Lee should reflect on his failure to ask the National Assembly to reconsider the Criminal Procedure Act revision, even after acknowledging the need for supplementary investigative powers. It would be advisable for him to raise the issue publicly at his luncheon with Democratic Party lawmakers on the 28th and to focus the selection of the next justice minister on resolving the turmoil in the criminal justice system.
