A South Korean court handed down a prison sentence to the chief of intelligence at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, who had ordered several intelligence reports about Halloween crowds to be deleted shortly after the deadly Itaewon crowd crush of 2022. The court spoke to the “responsibility of the police” and the need for a full investigation of the tragedy in its sentencing.
“The defendant deserves to be punished severely because he downplayed and obscured the responsibility of the police and made it harder to discover the truth, betraying the whole nation’s hopes for the tragedy to be fully investigated and the responsible parties identified,” the court said in its verdict.
This is the first judicial decision related to state responsibility to be reached in the 16 months since the tragedy occurred on Oct. 29, 2022.
Bae Seong-jung, a senior judge in the 11th criminal division of the Seoul Western District Court, sentenced Park Seong-min, the former head of intelligence on public peace and security for the Seoul police, to 18 months in prison on Wednesday for ordering the destruction of evidence. However, the court did not have Bae taken into legal custody because he doesn’t present a flight risk and is unlikely to destroy any more evidence.
Kim Jin-ho, the former head of the intelligence section at the Yongsan Police Station, was convicted on the same charge and given a one-year prison sentence suspended for three years. An employee in the same intelligence section who was convicted of destroying evidence was given a suspended four-month prison sentence.
The court accepted the facts presented by the prosecutors in their entirety. The four deleted intelligence reports explicitly noted the risk of huge crowds on Halloween and effectively demonstrated the need for the police to assess whether they had done enough to prepare for that contingency. In awareness of that, the defendants had given orders to delete a wide range of reports, leading the court to conclude that the defendants had intended to destroy evidence to reduce the police’s level of liability.
The court also noted that responsibility for the tragedy lay with higher-ranking figures in the police. It acquitted Park and Kim on the charge of destroying evidence on the grounds that the evidence destroyed by the Yongsan intelligence section employee pertained to their own crimes, thus nullifying the charge.
Under Korean law, an individual cannot be charged with destroying evidence of their own crime.
“Police responsibility is related to policy decisions about whether [appropriate] measures were taken after receiving adequate advance warning about the risk of an accident. Low-level officials [in the intelligence section] cannot be held responsible for that,” the court said.
In short, the court only convicted the Yongsan intelligence section employee of destroying evidence of other people’s crimes because the case was too big for an employee of that rank to be held responsible for it.
“We are pleased that the court has recognized the criminal responsibility of police intelligence and handed down a prison sentence to Park Seong-min, the defendant bearing the greatest responsibility. We hope the courts will sternly punish other defendants going forward to console the suffering families and restore justice,” the Oct. 29 Itaewon Tragedy Citizens’ Action Group said in a statement.
Park was indicted again on Jan. 19 for having another report deleted, but that trial has yet to begin.
By Kim Ga-yoon, staff reporter
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