South Korea's police have no separate performance metric for adult missing-person cases, according to findings by The Seoul Economic Daily. With missing-person indicators concentrated on children and adolescents, investigations into missing adults have been left largely outside the scope of evaluation. Officers say objective criteria are needed to assess initial response and search procedures in adult cases as well.
Reporting compiled on the 27th found that the comprehensive public safety performance evaluation index, which the police use to assess both organizational and individual performance, contains no evaluation item related to missing adults. Adult missing-person cases are handled mainly by criminal investigation units at metropolitan and provincial police agencies or at local stations, but the relevant performance indicators specify no qualitative or quantitative evaluation items.
Cases involving missing children and adolescents, by contrast, have specific evaluation criteria. In its policy direction last year, the police designated "strengthening juvenile crime and missing-person prevention and youth protection activities" as a management task and set an "early discovery index for missing children" as a quantitative performance indicator. The measure is the rate of discovery within 48 hours, with a target of 96%.
Adult cases are often closed once the person's whereabouts are confirmed after a report, but there are few criteria for assessing initial risk judgments, the appropriateness of searches and investigations, or the scope of searches in long-term cases. In the self-assessment of last year's performance management that the Korean National Police Agency released in February, related tasks including a next-generation missing-person information system, missing-person alert text messages and upgrades to the Safe Dream app were all placed under the children and adolescents category. Among 10 major bills, enactment of a law on missing adults was effectively the only task related to adult cases.
Officers in the field say the gap in evaluation can affect where adult missing-person investigations rank as an organizational priority and how motivated the officers handling them are. An officer who previously handled missing-person work at a local police station in Seoul said, "Large regional differences in the number of missing-person reports appear to be part of the reason it was not included in the performance indicators." The officer added, "Solving an adult missing-person case often is not properly reflected in performance, so the work itself is sometimes treated as a dead-end post, and it tends to lose out to other divisions in performance reviews."
Another officer with experience on a missing-person investigation team said, "There is no evaluation advantage to finding a missing adult quickly, and conversely there is no structure that penalizes you if the discovery is delayed." The officer said, "Fundamental improvement will require setting evaluation criteria while also expanding the personnel and budget needed for missing-person investigations, such as introducing two-officer teams."
