Lee Hyo-sik is Finance Desk editor at The Korea Times. He manages finance-related stories on macroeconomics, banks, stocks, bonds, crypto etc. He is passionate about covering what's happening in Korea's financial industry and explaining it to both Korean and non-Korean readers. You can reach him at leehs@koreatimes.co.kr. Your insights and feedbacks are always appreciated.
Police declare war against gangsters
By Lee Hyo-sik
Police launched an extensive crackdown on organized crime rings across the country Monday, which will continue through the end of December.
The National Police Agency (NPA) announced that it will set up special teams at 16 regional police agencies nationwide to arrest gangsters in a war against criminal gangs.
The move follows a series of recent corruption scandals and a lukewarm police response to violent crimes.
“Gangsters’ activities should not heighten public fears. We will step up the mobilization of police force to ensure public security,” an NPA official said.
He said the NPA also launched a full-scale in-house cleanup campaign to root out corrupt officers and those who neglect their duties.
In the past, only those directly responsible for wrongdoings and their supervisors were reprimanded. But this time, heads of district police stations and senior officers at municipal agencies have become the target of a full-fledged internal inspection.
The NPA has decided to start a probe into the Incheon Metropolitan Police Agency (IMPA), which it said mishandled a violent clash between rival gangs Friday.
More than 130 gangsters from two organized crime rings clashed in the city streets late at night. Police officers were dispatched to the scene after nearby residents called 119 emergency services.
But the officers did nothing to stop the violence and just watched as one of the gangsters was stabbed by a rival gang member.
Following the incident, the head of Incheon Namdong Police Station was relieved of duty and other senior officers were heavily reprimanded.
A senior NPA officer said the agency is looking into the IMPA, which oversees the Namdong station, to check whether Commissioner Shin du-ho and other high-ranking officers there appropriately performed their duties concerning the case.
“We think that senior officers at the Incheon agency failed to properly deal with the incident and filed a false report in a bid to evade responsibility. To verify these, we launched an extensive inspection into senior agency officials,” he said.
NPA Commissioner Cho Hyun-oh was reportedly aware of the clash between mobsters through media reports, not through an official briefing channel.
The NPA plans to inspect other senior officers at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency after the dubious collusion between police officers and a funeral home was uncovered.
The Seoul Southern District Prosecutors’ Office said Friday that investigators raided a funeral home in Guro district, southwestern Seoul, on suspicion that it bribed police officers to deliver corpses to it.
The funeral home is suspected of giving tens of thousands of won to officers when they brought bodies of those who died from traffic accidents and other unnatural causes. The funeral home generated handsome profits as most bereaved families held funeral services there
The NPA official said the Seoul agency had previously received a tip on the collusion between the funeral home and officers.
“But the agency prematurely closed the case, saying it lacked evidence. We will hold those who led the investigation accountable. We will look into officers from Guro Police Station and several other nearby district police stations to discover those involved in the corpses-for-cash scam,” the official said.