Police [Yonhap]
Police [Yonhap]

The number of formal challenges filed against police decisions not to refer criminal complaints to prosecutors has more than doubled over the past four years, new data shows.

According to data obtained from the Korean National Police Agency by People Power Party lawmaker Kim Jae-seop, complainants filed 56,165 challenges last year against police decisions to close cases without referral — 2.1 times the 27,262 recorded in 2021.

The figure reached 34,001 in the first half of this year alone, through June. At that pace, the annual total could approach 70,000 by year's end.

The challenge procedure allows complainants to contest a police decision not to forward a case to prosecutors. Once a challenge is filed, police must immediately refer the case to prosecutors.

The surge is partly attributed to a rise in non-referral decisions themselves. Such decisions increased 49 percent, from 389,179 in 2021 to 580,774 last year.

More telling is that the challenge rate — the share of non-referral decisions that drew a formal challenge — rose from 7 percent in 2021 to 9.7 percent last year. In the first half of this year it climbed further to 11.3 percent, meaning roughly one in 10 non-referral decisions is now being contested.

The number of cases in which prosecutors overturned police non-referral decisions after receiving a challenge has also grown.

Cases in which prosecutors conducted or ordered supplementary investigations and then proceeded to indictment reached 1,130 last year, 2.1 times the 528 recorded in 2021.

Requests for investigative review — a separate oversight mechanism introduced alongside the challenge procedure following the 2021 redistribution of investigative authority between police and prosecutors — also tripled, rising from 2,131 in 2021 to 6,223 last year.

The investigative review process allows complainants, informants and other parties to a case to raise concerns about procedural unfairness or legal irregularities in an investigation.

When a review request is deemed warranted, an investigative review committee convenes, drawing on outside experts including lawyers and legal scholars.

The committee may issue directives to the investigating unit — including orders for supplementary or renewed investigation, expedited processing, reassignment to another unit, or on-site correction and training. The directives are not legally binding but are difficult to refuse without justification.

The number of cases in which a committee was actually convened after a review request found problems in the investigative process rose 57.7 percent, from 156 sessions in 2021 to 246 last year.

The committee met 140 times in the first half of this year, putting it on track to set a new annual record.

The number of cases in which the committee ordered supplementary or renewed investigation — finding the original probe insufficient — jumped from 80 in 2021 to 711 last year, a nearly ninefold increase.

Observers inside and outside the police have noted that since officers gained primary authority to close cases in 2021, distrust in police investigative capacity has fueled the rise in both challenges and review requests.

A former police officer now practicing as a lawyer who recently handled a client's challenge said that since the 2021 reform removed police from prosecutors' oversight, officers have tended to investigate passively in complex fraud and financial crime cases where establishing charges is difficult.

"There are even cases where officers tell complainants, 'This case is complicated — hire a lawyer, organize the evidence and bring it back,'" the lawyer added.

The situation has renewed calls for prosecutors to retain a meaningful oversight role over police.

A senior prosecutor said the rise in challenges "directly reflects public demand for prosecutorial oversight of police," adding that it explains why proposals such as mandatory full-case referral continue to be raised.

Mandatory full-case referral — which would require police to forward all investigated cases to prosecutors — was abolished as part of the 2021 reform.

Lawmaker Kim said the public's failure to accept police investigative outcomes "shows that police investigations have been that deficient," and argued that "it would be the wrong order of things to strip away the supplementary investigative authority that serves as a check, at a time when distrust in police is only growing."


greg@heraldcorp.com