On the 13th, a 59-year-old man identified as Choi Chung-rak stabbed passersby at random inside a large commercial complex in Guwol-dong, Namdong-gu, Incheon, wounding eight people. Choi was wearing an electronic ankle monitor over a past attempted murder conviction and had been rated "high" for reoffending risk under the Korean Offender Risk Assessment System-General (KORAS-G), a profile that called for close supervision. The monitoring failed to prevent the attack. Police responded by announcing their highest level of mobilization, launching special security operations that included stepped-up patrols of crowded facilities and the formation of a large dedicated task force. But each time a crime like this occurs, blame for the failure to prevent it falls on police, who are then also tasked with the response — a pattern that critics say obscures the responsibility of the agencies charged with managing high-risk offenders and stopping crimes before they happen.
The Incheon Metropolitan Police Agency is pushing special security operations, including concentrating patrol officers at crowded facilities, to prevent random attacks similar to the Guwol-dong stabbing, according to police on the 18th. The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency declared a "special safety operation period" for crowded venues from the 14th through Nov. 1, mobilizing available forces including district police, the Metropolitan Crime Prevention Patrol Unit and mobile units to strengthen patrols. Police said they would designate priority areas by analyzing crime data and emergency calls, and step up prevention by stopping and questioning people in public places who appear to be carrying weapons or behaving suspiciously.
Since the random stabbing attack at Seohyeon Station, blame has landed on police every time a knife attack occurs. Officers have faced questions not only about whether their initial response was adequate but also about why they failed to detect the risk beforehand. The follow-up work — stepped-up patrols, special countermeasures — has also always fallen to police. The reason is that police are closest to what citizens can actually see and feel about their own safety.
Police clearly have a duty to carry out crime prevention. But while criticism and demands for after-the-fact measures pile up on police, little scrutiny reaches the gaps in judgment and supervision at the agencies that assess and monitor offenders' risk of reoffending.
The Incheon case exposed structural problems that front-line policing alone cannot address. In 2015, Choi was sentenced to four years in prison for attempting to murder his ex-wife. His risk assessment at the time scored 14 points, classifying him as "high" risk for reoffending. The court ordered him to wear an electronic ankle monitor, but he committed the attack while wearing it. On the day of the stabbing, he met with his probation officer for about 35 minutes and had lunch with the officer, then went on his rampage a little over an hour later. The appropriateness of the Ministry of Justice's electronic supervision grading system drew belated attention, and it emerged that Choi had been placed in the "intensive" category — the second-lowest of four levels. His grade was left unchanged even after he was booked for carrying a weapon during a one-person protest. That has raised questions about the standards used to assess warning signs and reflect them in supervision levels.
Courts' decisions on ankle monitor orders have also come under question. The Seoul Economic Daily analyzed first-instance rulings in violent crime cases published on the judiciary's information disclosure portal from January of this year to the present and found that 17 of 24 requests for ankle monitor orders, or 70.8%, were rejected. In 11 of those cases, the defendant had been classified as "high" risk for reoffending under assessments including KORAS-G. Eleven of the 17 rejected defendants had prior convictions.
In seven cases, the request was rejected even though the defendant scored 15 points or higher — above the 14 points recorded by Choi, the Incheon stabbing suspect. In January, the Jeonju District Court rejected an ankle monitor order for a defendant identified as B, who had scored 17 points on a reoffending risk assessment. B had been indicted on charges of picking a fight with a man in his 20s who was eating fried chicken on an outdoor platform and stabbing him with a 28-centimeter hunting knife, the court said. The court said the defendant had "no record of a past homicide offense" and that it was "difficult to conclude that (the defendant) poses a risk of committing another homicide."
In the case of a man indicted for attempted murder who had been booked 33 times, received eight prison sentences and served 12 years and six months, with 13 prior convictions for violence, the Daegu District Court rejected the order, saying "probation alone can prevent reoffending." A defendant who attacked a stranger with a knife, as in the Guwol-dong case, also avoided an ankle monitor. In April, the Suwon District Court sentenced a man who stabbed a delivery worker in his 50s multiple times with two knives while hallucinating to five years in prison and five years of probation, but rejected the monitoring order.
In other cases, orders were rejected even for defendants rated "high" risk, on the grounds that their scores were relatively low within that band. A defendant with a prior sex offense who indecently assaulted a minor scored 16 points on the reoffending risk assessment and 25 points on a psychopathy screening tool. The court rejected the order, citing reasons including that the score was relatively low within the high band and that schizophrenia is treatable.
Courts have frequently offered probation as the alternative, but probation itself lacks the capacity to closely supervise high-risk offenders. According to the Ministry of Justice, 83,424 cases were placed under probation from January through August this year. As of last month, there were 1,986 probation officers, each handling 40 to 50 cases. An ankle monitor tracks a wearer's location but does nothing to block the intent to commit a crime, meaning substantive supervision calibrated to risk — and more staff to deliver it — must back it up.
That has prompted calls to examine whether the standards are clear enough to explain why cases with identical reoffending risk ratings produce opposite rulings. Even granting deference to the courts, the factors weighed and the criteria applied in each case are opaque, making it hard to ensure consistency or predictability in monitoring orders. Experts say specific standards are needed so that risk assessment results, prior convictions and the type of offense can all be factored into decisions on ankle monitor orders.
With court decisions in question but patrols and other after-the-fact measures left to police, discontent is building inside the force. Patrol staffing has been cut sharply, yet the same workload lands on officers whenever an incident occurs. The Mobile Patrol Unit, launched in August last year by former National Police Agency Commissioner General Cho Ji-ho as his signature initiative for preemptive response to motiveless crime, has been scaled back nationwide. In December last year it was downsized and reorganized into the Metropolitan Crime Prevention Patrol Unit. This year, police said they would cut patrol staffing further to fill shortages in investigative units. The police budget proposal for 2027 showed dedicated crime prevention patrol personnel cut by more than half.
Officers call the combination of fewer personnel and more duties a textbook stopgap. An officer at a front-line police station in Seoul said: "Every time a violent crime happens, people curse us and then come looking for us anyway. The Ministry of Justice, which is supposed to manage offenders, and the courts, which hand down slap-on-the-wrist sentences, are powers that don't touch people's daily lives, so in the end they grab the easy target — the police — and vent."
A senior officer at the senior superintendent level said: "The National Police Agency cuts patrol staffing, then an incident happens and the same workload gets assigned anyway. It has a big effect on internal morale." The officer added: "We step up patrols for a few weeks, sometimes a few months, then it quiets down, and when another crime happens later we roll out another patrol surge. It's the same patchwork cycle. If policing isn't going to stay a temporary response, shouldn't we start by reviewing the risk management system that operates before a crime occurs?"
Oh Yoon-sung, a professor of police administration at Soonchunhyang University, said: "It's wrong to start with police supervision in the Guwol-dong stabbing. The suspect was sentenced to five years in the first trial for attempted murder and then released with a suspended sentence on appeal. We should start by asking what rulings the judiciary has handed down to an offender who repeatedly showed warning signs." He added: "Judges do need discretion, but if they keep issuing decisions they cannot justify even to themselves, they bring the narrowing of that discretion on themselves."
He continued: "Every time something happens, the answer is 'more police patrols.' This incident didn't happen because patrols were missing, so more patrols won't solve it. The priority is to fix the judiciary's standards first, and then build a system in which police and probation agencies share risk information and can raise the intensity of supervision as risk levels change."
