Police fail to intervene a murder case even after receiving 112 call

Police failed to intervene a murder case which could have been prevented, only if the police had accurately processed what was reported through 112 and arrived earlier. Last weekend, a son of a woman surnamed Park called 112 in Hannam-dong in Yongsan district, Seoul, and reported that his mother was holding a deadly weapon and waiting for his girlfriend. Hannam Police Station sent a police car to the location where the 112 call was originated but another police car arrived for a domestic violence case after receiving a call 10 minutes ago. The police car, which was dispatched by the son’s call, regarded both cases were the same. While the police car was returning to the police station, policemen spotted the son’s friend crying out and belatedly headed to the site. When the police arrived the place, Park had already killed her son’s girlfriend.

The 112 report is for emergency cases of which every minute counts. Above all, the police must immediately figure out the location of a caller and record descriptions of a criminal event. There was a plenty room for misunderstanding for the dispatched policemen as the locations of the two callers were only 60m away from each other. Park’s son called to the police one more time 15 minutes before the murder was committed, while he was waiting for the police. However, the police did not thoroughly reviewed the situation and easily regarded that the caller of the previous domestic violence case moved by 60m.

In 2012, a woman who was about to be raped by a Chinese-Korean Oh Won-chun in Suwon called 112 in emergency. The emergency call center agent wasted time by asking unnecessary questions repeatedly and the woman was murdered. Kang Shin-myung, the National Police Agency Commissioner General, vowed to improve the 112 emergency call system in a massive scale to prevent similar cases to the ‘Oh Won-chun’ murder case when he took office last year. However, little progress has been made. In August, the Board of Audit and Inspection disclosed its investigation result that the call-back rate of the ‘call-back system,’ in which the police calls back to the phone number where the report was received, remained only 8%. Park’s murder case has revealed the fact that experts who have trained for emergency responses are not posted to the 112 emergency call center.

How fast the police respond to an emergency call can save a citizen’s life or leave the person die. The police has released an improvement plan on Sep. 14 as a part of the parliamentary inspection to adjust the number of 112 emergency call center agents in a flexible way and to strengthen training programs for policemen to dispatch to criminal sites. What is more important is actions, not just words. Still, the police is not able to track the location of a 112 caller without consent. The Assembly shall revise the relevant law to allow the police to introduce an automatic tracking system of 112 callers’ locations as in the U.S. The 112 emergency call system which works fine will make the Korean society a safe and advanced society.