The number of suspects in unresolved criminal cases such as fraud and assault has more than tripled in five years in South Korea. The increase has been steepest in crimes that affect ordinary citizens, prompting warnings that the cost of what critics call routine investigative delay is falling squarely on the public.
Suspects in unresolved cases totaled 275,279 in the first nine months of this year, up by nearly 120,000 from 157,558 a year earlier, according to the Public Prosecution Agency on the 22nd. The figure stood at just 87,967 in 2022, the year after South Korea redrew investigative powers between prosecutors and police. It rose to 100,504 in 2023 and 113,385 in 2024, then passed 150,000 last year before reaching 275,000 in only nine months this year — more than triple the level of five years ago.
The rise has been most pronounced in cases such as fraud, assault and sexual violence. Suspects in unresolved fraud cases reached 55,882 through September, up about 40,000 from 18,724 in 2022. Unresolved assault cases involved 8,030 suspects in 2022 but 26,595 in the first nine months of this year, more than a threefold increase. Sexual violence cases accounted for 7,322 suspects through September, roughly 3,000 more than the 4,292 recorded last year and more than double the 3,049 counted in 2022.
Experts attribute the yearly surge, concentrated in everyday criminal cases such as fraud, to abrupt changes in the criminal justice system, along with a succession of politically charged investigations and special counsel probes. The criminal justice framework has been overhauled with each change of government, they said, and the concentration of investigative manpower on some political cases and special counsel work has left gaps in everyday crime and public safety enforcement.
"Before prosecution reform, the structure of a criminal investigation was simple — police handled the initial investigation and prosecutors handled supplementary investigation," said Kim Han-kyu, an attorney at law firm Gonggan. "But as police were given authority to close cases and prosecutors lost the power to conduct supplementary investigations, the number of procedural steps increased and investigations themselves have slowed sharply."
The concern is that further delays may be unavoidable until the new criminal justice framework, built around the launch of the Public Prosecution Agency and the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency, settles into place. The core of the new system is the separation of investigation and prosecution. Prosecutors are now fully barred from conducting investigations, and their authority to carry out supplementary investigations has been abolished. Prosecutors have also lost the power to direct special judicial police. Experts say that if the growing pains of such a rapid shift come to the surface, side effects such as cases being bounced back and forth between agencies could persist.
"In a word, this is not a change in the investigative system but its collapse," said one attorney and former senior prosecutor. "Prosecutors who have to decide whether to indict find it difficult to conclude that an investigation has been thorough enough, so they have no choice but to keep asking police or the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency for supplementary work." The attorney added: "For special judicial police, who used to work under prosecutors' direction, supplementary investigation itself could be a major obstacle. They have investigative experience but not enough legal knowledge, so it is questionable whether they can properly carry out what prosecutors ask of them." Another attorney and former prosecutor said: "Victims who can get adequate help from a lawyer are relatively fortunate, but those who cannot are left to suffer in silence even after being harmed by crime. Investigations are not moving at any real speed, and this has become a world that works out well only for criminal suspects."