A police officer booked on suspicion of falsely closing a missing-person case involving a woman surnamed Jang in Jeju in May has admitted that he closed the case without ever speaking with her by phone after the report was filed. The Jeju Police Agency has also launched an internal audit of overnight situation reports filed by the missing-persons team at Jeju Western Police Station to determine whether key details were omitted as the case moved up the chain of command.
According to the Jeju Police Agency on the 28th, the officer, identified only by his surname Bu, told investigators the previous day that his earlier statements about speaking with Jang by phone had been false, admitting part of the allegations against him. Bu had maintained that he reached Jang when the missing-person report was filed.
Investigators presented telecommunications records showing no call history between the two, along with autopsy findings indicating Jang is believed to have died in the early hours of May 12 or 13, before the report was filed. Police plan to deploy profilers to determine why and how Bu fabricated the call and closed the case. Digital forensics on Jang's mobile phone are also underway to establish her final movements and the circumstances of her death. Bu is expected to be referred to prosecutors next week.
Police are also examining whether Bu omitted Jang's case from overnight situation reports. Cases involving missing women must be reported to the police station chief and the Jeju Police Agency because of the possibility of criminal harm, but Jang's case was found not to have been reported to the Jeju police commissioner.
Bu is accused of notifying the party that reported Jang missing, her boyfriend, roughly two and a half hours after receiving the report on May 15 that he had reached Jang but that she did not want her location disclosed, and then closing the case. The case was also cleared from the police's missing-persons profiling system the same day.
Meanwhile, the National Police Agency issued a special alert on public service discipline from that day through the 6th of next month, following a series of improperly handled cases including this one. During the period, the agency will step up checks on the conduct of officers nationwide, ban all staff dinners and postpone most events. An official at the agency's human rights and audit office said that the way public officials handle their duties can, depending on the outcome, lead to problems on a different scale from simple mistakes, and called on individual officers to work together with the mindset that each represents the organization in order to restore public trust commensurate with their authority.
