President chairs pan-government meeting on building an 'ultra-safe society'

'Action plan is the starting point for public safety'

President Lee Jae Myung speaks at the pan-government meeting on building an ultra-safe society, held at Cheong Wa Dae on Friday. [Yonhap]
President Lee Jae Myung speaks at the pan-government meeting on building an ultra-safe society, held at Cheong Wa Dae on Friday. [Yonhap]

President Lee Jae Myung on Friday called for a sweeping shift to a prevention-first public safety system, saying the government must approach violent crime — including relationship-based offenses and random-motive attacks — "with the resolve to declare war."

Opening a pan-government meeting on building an "ultra-safe society" at Cheong Wa Dae, Lee said public anxiety had grown sharply as violent crimes continued to mount — from offenses committed within intimate relationships such as families and romantic partners to random-motive attacks targeting unspecified victims.

"These crimes are a serious problem that endangers not only individual victims but the safety of society as a whole," he said. "In particular, relationship-based crimes keep repeating a pattern in which victims are exposed to ongoing threats or fail to receive adequate protection even after reporting the danger."

Lee said the situation could no longer be left unaddressed. "Protecting the lives and safety of the people is the most fundamental duty of the state," he said, "and we must approach violent crime with the resolve to declare war on it."

He also called for a fundamental overhaul of the public safety paradigm. "We must go beyond reactive responses and make a sweeping shift to a prevention-first system — including building mechanisms that can detect warning signs early," Lee said. He added that authorities should conduct thorough analyses of crimes that have already occurred to determine whether they could have been prevented, and use those findings to establish recurrence-prevention measures that reliably protect the public from similar threats.

"I convened this meeting under a grave sense of crisis so that all relevant ministries could come together and discuss extraordinary measures," he said.

Lee said the pan-government action plan for an ultra-safe society discussed Friday was "the starting point for building a society where every citizen can feel safety and security in their daily lives." He urged participants to produce effective measures through the day's discussions that the public would be able to feel as real change, saying there could be "not even the smallest gap" in the work of protecting people's lives and safety.

Earlier, at Lee's direction, Cheong Wa Dae Policy Chief Ha Jun-kyung chaired a presidential office meeting on Oct. 15, and Prime Minister Han Seong-sook presided over an interministerial meeting on Monday. Those sessions covered sector-by-sector measures including crime prevention, strengthened on-scene response, isolation and punishment of offenders, and protection and support for victims.

Friday's meeting was convened to report on and review pan-government measures — built on the discussions held so far — for responding to random-motive and relationship-based crimes as well as violent offenses targeting socially vulnerable groups.


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