A view of the Gumi Police Station. [Herald DB]
A view of the Gumi Police Station. [Herald DB]

The Gumi Police Station in North Gyeongsang Province is facing allegations of inflating its performance statistics after splitting a single criminal case into dozens of separate files before referring them to prosecutors. Police have acknowledged the error but insist it was a simple mistake by the officer in charge.

According to the Gimcheon Branch of the Daegu District Prosecutors' Office and Gumi police, a mart employee in his 40s stole goods worth about 700,000 won ($506) from a store in Gumi in March, committing the theft on 51 separate occasions.

The Gumi Police Station referred the case to prosecutors as 51 individual theft cases, but prosecutors rejected the filings.

The station denied the allegations of performance padding.

A Gumi Police Station official told Yonhap that the handling was "clearly wrong," but attributed it to the officer's unfamiliarity with internal case-writing guidelines.

The official explained that internal guidelines on documenting theft incidents were revised in 2016 to require that multiple offenses committed at the same location be consolidated into a single case — noting the first incident and submitting one file to prosecutors. The officer in charge had not been aware of this requirement, the official said.

The official added that the station was reviewing internal measures, including training, to prevent a recurrence, and said the error stemmed from unfamiliarity with the guidelines rather than any attempt to inflate statistics.


jshan@heraldcorp.com