According to police on Oct. 13, the National Office of Investigation plans to instruct provincial and metropolitan police agencies to tally and report the number of cases subject to the comprehensive review. The review itself will run from Oct. 19 to 30.
Cases under review reportedly include those currently under investigation, individuals classified as Grade A for monitoring, and cases where safety measures such as smartwatch distribution are in place. Stalking reports closed in the field since May, after the first-half comprehensive review concluded, will also be examined. Police plan to focus on whether smartwatches were provided and whether the devices malfunctioned.
Police previously conducted a comprehensive review of relationship-based crime cases over roughly one month after a stalking murder occurred in Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province, in March. Police had planned an additional comprehensive review of relationship-based crimes at year-end but decided to move it up following the string of violent incidents.
Arrests of stalking and domestic violence suspects are indeed rising. According to the Korean National Police Agency, arrests of such suspects reached 43,788 through August this year, up 41.6% from 30,924 in the same period last year. Over the same period, orders requiring stalking suspects to wear electronic monitoring devices surged about 388%, from 155 to 757.
Meanwhile, a court held a pre-detention hearing for a man in his 20s who was arrested after allegedly killing his mother-in-law, abducting his wife and fleeing to Gangwon Province, and ordered him detained. The suspect, identified as A, who was serving as a public service worker, is accused of killing his mother-in-law, a woman in her 50s, on the morning of Oct. 11, then putting his wife, who is in her 20s, in a car and driving her to Yangyang, Gangwon Province. The mother-in-law was taken to a hospital in cardiac arrest but died. Police arrested A on an emergency warrant on a wooded hillside in Yangyang County about seven hours after the crime, on charges including murder of a lineal ascendant's relative and special confinement. His wife, found in the car, was unharmed.