South Korean police admit responsibility for Halloween tragedy

"Lessons will be learned, blah, blah, blah"

The fact is many people were calling the police as early as 7pm that the situation was getting dangerously out of control and that the police needed to come in in large numbers and break the flows of people up. But the police ignored them, because the Head of police was more interested in policing an anti-government demo in another part of the city.

Ego - well expressed.

Quite mind-boggling that 7,000 police were sent to a demonstration but only 137 to monitor a crowd in excess of 100,000.

And to ignore very early pleas for assistance - well that's such a hierarchical failure that can never be overlooked when the lopping starts.

Also, I read elsewhere that the narrow lane had always been closed in previous events to prevent such an overcrowding stream.

Can anyone confirm this?

Just wondering but are the cops they were going to send trained in crowd control? Seems to me there's a big difference between a traffic cop and a guy in the narcotics division. Not sure just sending in more cops could have prevented this tragedy.

No need to have a formal investigation, Office Dibble has put his hand up.

Or worded carefully.....

South Korea's police chief admitted "a heavy responsibility" for failing to prevent a recent crowd surge that killed more than 150 people during Halloween festivities in Seoul, saying Tuesday that officers didn't effectively handle earlier emergency calls about the impending disaster.

That is not remotely fact of having admitted a specified or implied responsibility that would constitute liability.

The families need closure.

Not a finger pointing blame game, if there is fault, then an independent enquiry can establish what lessons, guidelines need to be taken into consideration.

But to just say its my fault, is duplicity

No foreclose, a betrayal to the families.

...the police needed to come in in large numbers and break the flows of people up. But the police ignored them, because the Head of police was more interested in policing an anti-government demo in another part of the city.

This is the kind of "control" that exercises the attention of politicians and their police forces everywhere and is a frequent sub-text of Korean movies: "Memories of Murder" and "Train to Busan" are just two such examples.

Policing is such a wide banner of skills and behaviours....

This is not just a police issue though ....

It needs a whole of government and community approach. Policing, urban planning, events organisation, community engagement, positive engagement with youth culture/s.

Will need planned Halloween events ... To focus crowds to places where they can be managed ... Tickets for the area.

My condolences to all the families affected.

After all it is not like they can pretend to be free of responsibility, it is 2022, many different tragedies have happened and the need for crowd control for these kind of events is therefore considered extremely important. Just letting people crowd uncontrollably without even dedicating anyone to keep track of it has no excuse.

In hindsight, the SK police could have acted to prevent the tragedy, but it is not as if they caused it. We have an expression; hindsight is 20-20.

I don't understand - how, when you see a street choc-a-block full of people, why would you try and shove your way into it ? All the people at the start of the jam, should be prosecuted for Homicide - perhaps that, would make people think in future going forward.... Even take the draconian step of sending them all to North Korea, regardless of Nationality for a year long "experience" of "Hell"...

This is very contrastive to Japan where responsible organization try to escape from responsibility.

I don't understand - how, when you see a street choc-a-block full of people, why would you try and shove your way into it ?

Because the people behind you are trying to go forward and you have no way to go out of the place? this is not a situation where the street was empty and suddenly it got chocked full of people, but something that happen gradually with more and more people slowly getting less and less space until everybody was trapped in place, those coming behind are just being pushed forward by people further back and so on, the people that had enough space to go elsewhere instead of walking forward were a long distance from the site of the deaths, with no way of knowing what was happening.

So many young died.