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Security ranks excessive on the listing of priorities for South Korean and international residents alike when selecting the place to stay within the nation. However regardless of in depth on-line entry to public information, assessing the relative safety of particular Korean cities and neighborhoods stays a surprisingly difficult process.
For starters, Korea usually presents a powerful security profile, with murder charges starting from 0.5 to 0.6 per 100,000 residents in response to the newest estimates from the United Nations Workplace on Medicine and Crime and the World Financial institution.
This determine hovers round one-tenth of the worldwide common and is decrease than most different developed nations, together with Australia, Canada and Sweden. The USA State Division’s 2023 Crime and Security Report affirms these reassuring numbers, noting Korea’s “low violent crime price” and “very secure” setting for many guests.
Nonetheless, as in any nation, security ranges inevitably range throughout localities — a nuance that proves unexpectedly troublesome to discern right here attributable to a notable dearth of publicly accessible, neighborhood-level crime information.
Shifting sands of security metrics
A fast search on-line in Korean for the “most secure cities to stay in” in Korea reveals a number of articles based mostly on the Ministry of the Inside and Security’s “regional security index,” introduced earlier this 12 months.
These stories crown 5 areas — Uiwang, Hanam and Yongin in Gyeonggi Province; Gyeryong in South Chungcheong Province; and Buk-gu in Ulsan — as Korea’s most secure locations to stay.
Launched yearly since 2015, the ministry’s security index ranks cities throughout six classes: crime security, visitors security, hearth security, on a regular basis accidents, infectious illnesses and suicides.
One other generally cited rating is the Korea Safety Index. This index, a joint effort by three university-affiliated analysis institutes, identifies Gwacheon in Gyeonggi Province, Sejong and Seoul’s Seocho-gu as the highest three most secure localities. Notably, not one of the three made the minimize on the Inside Ministry’s listing.
The differing outcomes spotlight the problem of defining “city security,” with many indexes utilizing a variety of standards, various requirements and completely different scoring techniques to evaluate metropolis security.
Whereas this complete strategy has its deserves, it might not absolutely handle the considerations of bizarre residents — and of the particular reader who inquired — who are sometimes most involved with violent crime when evaluating a neighborhood’s security.
The query then turns into: the place is the precise crime information?
Uncooked crime information elusive
Oddly although, not one of the steadily cited security indexes present detailed crime information for every space, providing as an alternative solely common rankings with out revealing the precise statistics.
Concerning this, an official on the Inside Ministry advised The Korea Herald that they’re legally prohibited from disclosing detailed crime information obtained from regulation enforcement.
Some uncooked information on crime is on the market to the general public, by means of annual stories from the Nationwide Police Company and the Supreme Prosecutors’ Workplace. Accessible on-line by means of the businesses’ official web sites, these stories function the first supply for many authorities stories and tutorial analysis, together with the ministry’s security index.
The police and prosecutor’s workplace by and enormous work with the identical uncooked information and differ solely in how they course of it. Native police stations submit information of all charged instances from their jurisdictions to compile the preliminary dataset. The prosecutor’s workplace then takes this info, combines it with its personal investigative information and produces a extra complete nationwide evaluation. This closing report breaks down the statistics by area, sort of crime and varied demographic components.
The issue is that even these statistics cease in need of permitting for significant neighborhood-level comparisons. The police information solely supplies gross totals by metropolis (si) and district (gu) with out providing standardized per capita figures, making it difficult to interpret with out further effort to account for inhabitants dimension.
This 12 months marked the primary time the police supplied crime statistics right down to the district degree in its annual report, a Nationwide Police Company official advised The Herald. The official stated that the company has no plans at this level to offer additional breakdowns to the neighborhood degree in future stories, nevertheless.
The official declined to specify whether or not the company produces extra detailed localized information that isn’t made public or if such information doesn’t exist.
The prosecution’s report, however, does supply per capita crime charges, however just for the nation’s 17 main provinces and metropolitan cities — a scope too broad for evaluating particular areas.
In accordance with this report, Jeju topped the listing with the best variety of per capita legal fees in 2022, recording roughly 4,052 instances per 100,000 residents. On the different finish of the spectrum, Ulsan had the bottom price, with 1,597 instances per 100,000.
Public notion obsession produces inertia
The shortage of readily accessible detailed crime information in Korea is in contrast to different developed nations like the USA and the UK, the place extremely particular, up-to-date crime information is extensively disclosed to the general public. Authorities businesses and personal firms each supply interactive maps and crime monitoring instruments in these nations, permitting folks to view detailed crime statistics for particular person neighborhoods in actual time.
Jang Hyun-seok, a professor of police administration at Gyeonggi College, advised The Herald that he was perplexed on the issue of acquiring detailed info for his analysis. For him, who earned his Ph.D. in the USA finding out crime patterns within the Dallas-Fort Value space, the stark distinction in information accessibility between the 2 nations is all too obvious.
“Within the US, I may simply entry detailed crime information for my analysis,” Jang stated. “Right here, I can barely get my palms on any of it.”
“I’ve filed a number of requests for information entry, however the police all the time turned them down,” he stated. “All of us researchers are in the identical boat.”
As one doable purpose behind this reluctance, specialists pointed to widespread considerations amongst Korean nationals about neighborhood popularity, which is carefully tied to property values.
“Housing costs are an enormous deal right here,” he stated. “Folks get actually labored up in the event that they suppose crime information would possibly tank their property values.” He cited an occasion the place a colleague confronted a backlash from native teams after naming a selected neighborhood in crime-related analysis.
Park Cheol-hyun, a professor of police administration at Dongui College, recommended that the regulation enforcement’s tight-lipped strategy could also be pushed by worries about public notion and potential calls to shift sources.
“If detailed crime statistics had been made public, it might imply additional work for regulation enforcement,” Park stated. “Folks would possibly begin asking powerful questions on why some neighborhoods are safer than others, or demand that sources be shifted to higher-crime areas. These are complicated points that transcend simply policing.”
Park added that officers are hesitant to not break present norms or upset the general public. “Authorities officers not often stick their necks out,” he stated. “It is simply how the paperwork operates.”
Lack of transparency reinforces prejudices, obscures precise crime
Whereas the priority that releasing detailed crime information would possibly unfairly stigmatize sure neighborhoods is comprehensible, conserving this info underneath wraps may truly make issues worse.
With out laborious information to depend on, persons are left to depend on rumors and anecdotes, which may shortly spiral into fearmongering and scapegoating. This tendency is very true when the dearth of transparency is coupled with xenophobic stereotypes and concrete legends, perpetuated by sensationalist media portrayals and well-liked narratives.
Take, for instance, Seoul’s Daerim-dong space, which, with its comparatively bigger inhabitants of ethnic Korean Chinese language nationwide residents, native media steadily paints as a hotbed for legal gangs. This portrayal has spooked many Koreans right here into seeing the neighborhood as “harmful,” though there isn’t any information to help such fears.
Actually, the complete district of Yeongdeungpo-gu — inhabitants 374,735 as of August — which incorporates Daerim-dong — inhabitants 47,766 as of Might 2023 — had 15,915 registered ethnic Korean Chinese language nationwide residents as of September 2023, in response to Justice Ministry information. However since there isn’t any publicly accessible information on crime within the space, baseless xenophobic stereotypes concerning the neighborhood proceed to flow into unabated within the media and well-liked tradition.
As a substitute of defending communities, specialists additionally level out, withholding delicate information could undermine public security by getting in the way in which of essential analysis on crime prevention. The present lack of transparency not solely leaves residents unable to make knowledgeable choices about their security, but additionally critically limits students’ capacity to conduct research that would assist cut back crime and enhance policing methods, specialists advised The Herald.
This information blackout, specialists say, may hamstring efficient policymaking that depends on focused, data-driven crime prevention methods. And not using a clear image of the place and when crimes are taking place, it turns into practically inconceivable for researchers to develop and consider evidence-based options.
“Proof-based practices like sizzling spots policing are commonplace in different developed nations,” Jang defined. “These legal justice practices establish crime-concentrated areas after which goal them with elevated police presence and particular interventions.”
“They’re extensively accepted elsewhere, however they are a nonstarter right here as a result of we merely haven’t got the granular information to make them work.”
Jang acknowledges the delicate nature of the difficulty, recognizing that when such information turns into public, folks could use the numbers to pit neighborhoods in opposition to one another and gas unhealthy comparisons as to which areas are “higher.” Regardless of these considerations, he believes it is no purpose to maintain researchers from accessing the information for his or her research.
“We will not even start to review which insurance policies truly cut back crime as a result of we won’t get our palms on native information,” Jang stated. “So we’re left counting on research from overseas or simply how afraid persons are of crime, relatively than the fact on the bottom. We’re fairly actually at the hours of darkness right here.”
Specialists say that in varied cities in main developed nations like Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, UK and US, choices about funding main crime prevention applications hinge on rigorous testing in particular areas. The shortage of empirical testing makes it powerful for the federal government to allocate sources effectively, in response to Park.
“We’re placing insurance policies in place with out actually figuring out their long-term affect,” he stated. “It flies within the face of clear governance. Mainly, we’re spending taxpayer cash with out the required analysis to again it up.”
“I get that there are privateness considerations at play,” he added. “However I do not see the hurt in sharing crime statistics, so long as they’re correct.”
