Gwangsan Police Station in Gwangju, which recently faced allegations of evidence tampering in the case of Jang Yun-gi, the man who killed a female high school student in Gwangju, was found to have received a corrective recommendation from the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) two years ago over coercive investigation and illegal evidence collection.
According to the NHRCK on the 10th, the commission recommended in June 2024 that the Gwangju Metropolitan Police Agency commissioner provide job training on human rights protection during investigations and lawful evidence collection procedures for police officers at Gwangsan Police Station.
The recommendation followed a complaint filed with the NHRCK by a person identified as A, who had been under investigation at Gwangsan Police Station in 2018 on charges including kidnapping, unlawful confinement, and quasi-rape of his girlfriend. A's side claimed that officers used profanity and verbal abuse during the investigation, obtained CCTV footage without following lawful procedures, and then manipulated the footage.
A was arrested in an emergency arrest on charges including confining and assaulting his girlfriend in a vehicle for about three hours, then indicted with detention and held for about eight months. However, the court recognized only some charges, such as confinement and property damage, and found him not guilty of quasi-rape and injury. A was sentenced to six months in prison, suspended for one year.
During the investigation, the officers admitted to some profanity but denied that they had manipulated the CCTV footage. They also explained that filming the integrated control center's CCTV footage with a mobile phone was for criminal investigation purposes, and that they had neither the reason nor the technology to manipulate the footage.
However, the NHRCK's investigation found that the officers had repeatedly used high-level profanity and verbal abuse during the suspect interrogation and coerced A into making statements. The commission noted that the profanity and verbal abuse continued even after a lawyer was present, and that the investigation was conducted relying on the complainant's statements while ignoring requests to verify the facts.
The commission also pointed out that in the process of obtaining CCTV footage showing A's vehicle, the officers failed to follow lawful procedures, such as not sending an official request document from the police station level for the footage. Circumstances also emerged in which color CCTV footage of the incident scene had been switched to black-and-white.
"The act of coercing statements and using verbal abuse during the suspect interrogation constitutes a violation of the personality rights guaranteed under Article 10 of the Constitution," the NHRCK said. "In light of the handling of this case, the trial outcome, the opinions of reference agencies, and comparison footage, it is judged difficult to rule out the possibility that switching the color footage to black-and-white made it difficult to verify the incident scene."
