A squad of police officers prepare for a search mission to locate missing 37-year-old Jang Mi-ran on Jeju Island on Aug. 20.YONHAP
The police officer suspected of falsely closing a missing person case on Jeju Island may have closed around 10 other cases in the same manner, a police review found.
Police were initially unable to verify the status of the missing persons in four of the roughly 10 cases suspected of being falsely closed, according to reports by the JoongAng Ilbo on Monday. One was later found to be the man in his 60s, who was found dead on Saturday, while police have yet to reach the missing persons or others connected to the remaining three cases. The three cases do not include the case of 37-year-old Jang Mi-ran.
Around 200 missing person reports handled by the officer were reviewed by the police after Jang's case came to light. The officer was reportedly assigned to missing person cases as a member of the Jeju Seobu Police Station's criminal investigation division missing person search team for about a year.
Police are trying to contact the missing people, those who filed the reports and family members in the remaining three cases, but have yet to reach any of them.
Police suspect the three cases may also have been falsely closed, as Jang's case allegedly was.
In missing person reports filed between May and July — involving Jang and the man in his 60s later found dead — the officer allegedly falsely told those who filed the reports and others that the officer had spoken with the missing people. The missing people were then marked as no longer missing in the missing person profiling system. Police, however, found no records of calls between the officer and either of the missing people.
A poster seeking information on Jang Mi-ran, who went missing on Jeju Island in May. The poster describes Jang as a 37-year-old woman with long hair who is about 158 centimeters (5.2 feet) tall and went missing in the Hallim-eup area of Jeju City.SCREEN CAPTURE
There are concerns that there could be additional cases that were closed prematurely, as many adult missing person cases end with the person determined to have simply left home or returned voluntarily.
Of the 70,814 adults reported missing last year, 70,591, or 99.7 percent, had their cases resolved without a full-scale police search, according to the Korean National Police Agency.
Under police agency regulations, officers are required to record the reason for ending a person's missing status in the profiling system and report it to a superior. In practice, however, an officer can end the status without a superior's approval by entering a reason in the system, such as the person having been found dead.
Police plan to introduce an additional safeguard requiring a manager, such as a team leader or division chief, to review the stated reason and information entered by an officer seeking to close a missing person case before giving final approval.
“We apologize to the public,” Hong Seok-ki, head of the National Office of Investigation at the Korean National Police Agency, said during a visit to the Jeju Provincial Police on Sunday. “We will make institutional improvements to ensure this never happens again.”
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
