South Korea's police chief publicly admitted that officers failed to adequately respond to citizen warnings about a large crowd at a Halloween event in Seoul, where a surge killed over 150 people: 'The action of the police was insufficient.'
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol lays a flower at a makeshift memorial for the victims of the deadly Halloween crowd surge on Nov. 1. Photo: Jung Yeon-je/AFP via Getty Imagesin Seoul's Itaewon district that killed more than 150 people.
Yoon responded to criticism that not enough officers were at the scene by saying that police had deployed more officers to the site than they had in the pre-pandemic years. About 137 officers were dispatched to handle the 100,000 person crowd on Saturday, with most assigned to watch for crime — not crowd control,"The action of the police was insufficient," Yoon said, announcing that police would conduct an investigation into whether both the calls and the on-site response were handled properly, theSouth Korea's Interior and Safety Minister Lee Sang-min also apologized during a parliamentary session Tuesday, saying, "I deeply apologize to the...
Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon also apologized and promised to work toward creating better public safety measures.“It was blatantly predictable that something like this could happen with more than 100,000 people gathering,” South Korea's Democratic Party said in a statement, the“As the victims cried for help, there was no law enforcement in Itaewon to protect them. Where were the police? What were the public officials doing?" the statement added.
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