Crimes by Foreigners Reach All-Time High

With the number of foreigners in Korea surpassing 1 million, crimes committed by them have also spiked to alarming levels. However, the police are having difficulties investigating foreign criminals due to social leniency over foreigners and budget restrictions.

According to National Police Agency’s statistics, the number of crimes committed by foreigners tripled to 14,524 last year, from 4,328 in 2001. However, the number of police in charge of foreign criminals has remained unchanged for the past several years, hovering around 1,000. Out of the total 872 interpreters, the number of interpreters speaking languages other than English and Japanese, was just 182.

“Though the bulk of crimes by foreigners can be felt in our society, the situation of the police dealing with the crimes isn’t much different from years past, except those regions with a high population of foreigners such as Yongsan district of Seoul, Ansan City of Gyeonggi Province, “ said a chief police officer in Seoul.

In particular, recently more and more such crimes tend to become violent and sophisticated. Since 2005, intellectual offenses including fraud and embezzlement take have been the most frequently committed crimes by foreigners.

However, the police cannot even think about providing long-term, systematic investigations into organizational and intellectual crimes.

A police director in downtown Seoul complained about manpower shortage, saying, “Incidents involving assaults don’t cause language problems, but things are different from intellectual crimes.” He added, “It is hard to capture bosses or leaders of ring organizations due to language barriers in the case of sophisticated crimes like voice fishing.”

For these reasons, though police officials have constantly been tipped off about foreign rings in areas of Itaewon of Yongsan and Ansan. They failed to come up with specific measures to deal with them.

A police officer at Seoul’s Yongsan police station said, “Protecting the identity of informers in organization crimes matters. But it is impossible for domestic police officers to do so. Given these situations, we don’t have recent crimes statistics related to foreign ring groups or foreigners.”

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