Prosecutors probe Gumi police over clearance padding after 51 theft cases found to be by 1 suspect

Prosecutors are investigating whether police in Gumi, North Gyeongsang, attempted to pad their clearance rate after it was discovered that 51 thefts by a single individual were referred as 51 separate cases.

An employee who works at a supermarket in Gumi is suspected of stealing groceries and other goods worth about 700,000 won ($505) from the store on 51 occasions between January and March, the Gimcheon branch of the Daegu District Prosecutors' Office said Wednesday.

The Gumi Police Station treated each theft as a unique case. Officers wrote a separate report for every one and gave each its own case number so that the string of thefts could be counted in police performance statistics as 51 cases handled.

The Gimcheon branch, which received the referrals, concluded there was a problem with the handling, canceled its receipt of the cases and began investigating.

"The case is still under investigation so I cannot disclose details, but compared with similar matters it is rare to see one filed in dozens of pieces," an official at the Gimcheon branch said. "We suspect the police were trying to raise their clearance figures."

The Gumi Police Station has said the filings were a mistake by the officer who handled the case rather than an attempt to lift its numbers. An internal guideline for logging thefts, revised in 2016, requires repeated offenses at the same location to be recorded against the first incident and referred to prosecutors as one case, the station told Yonhap, and the officer was found not to have known that.

"We clearly did wrong," an official at the station said.

"There was absolutely no intention of inflating our clearance figures," the official said in interviews Wednesday. "We are reviewing measures to prevent a recurrence, including training on the guidelines, so that the same thing does not happen again."

BY CHO MUN-GYU [[email protected]]