Korean Police to Blame for Itaewon Crowd Crush Disaster?
People are eager to blame someone for the Itaewon crowd crush disaster and the Korean police have become the main target:
According to police, 137 police officers were deployed in Itaewon on Saturday night. When asked whether there was enough police presence, Yoon Hee-keun, new head of the National Police Agency, said on Monday it was “difficult” to give a definite answer.
Multiple eyewitness accounts say there was little police presence to control the crowd. Viral clips on social media show people struggling to move quickly.
In a briefing on Sunday, Lee Sang min, Minister of Interior and Safety, said he understood that deploying police officers or firefighters in advance could not have “solved the problem.”
But Professor Choi Don-mook at the department of fire engineering at Gachon University told The Korea Herald there were several ways to respond to a growing crowd.
“When there are this many people, traffic must be closed off. Even if the turnout grew unexpectedly, (the authorities) could have checked CCTVs or even use drones and introduce one way traffic if necessary,” he said.
Minister Lee’s remark has also been criticized by the Lawyers for a Democratic Society, better known as Minbyun, as potentially downplaying the government’s safety management responsibility.
In a viral TikTok, Nathan Taverniti, an Australian survivor who survived the deadly crowd crush, said there was a “lack of planning police force and emergency services.”
“You know how many people were going to that event. Why were you not prepared?” he said in the clip.
Steven Belsi, the father of an American student who died in the crowd crash, told NBC News that the South Korean police should have been better prepared.
Korea Herald
You can read more at the link, but in my opinion the simple thing that could have prevented what happened was to shutdown the Itaewon subway station. The tragedy happened just across the street from the train station. People were undoubtedly moving to and from the clubs and the train station using the narrow alley where the tragedy occurred. Closing Itaewon station may have caused less overcrowding in that area if people had to walk further to get into Itaewon from other stations.
With that all said if people really want to find who is to blame, then determine who started the initial pushing at the top of the slope that caused people to fall on top of each other in the alley.
I never needed a policeman to keep me from doing stupid things. I did plenty in my 20s; but people who carry guns are not what was needed.
What was needed was a modicum of common sense. And mobs never have that.
800 more police could not have saved those kids. They might well have killed some of the cops, if the cops were stationed along that alley.
Never blame the government for not correctly wiping your arse after you have a bowel movement. That’s on you, generically-speaking.
Be sure to bring your own wipes.
The Trumpians are reaching deep. Amusing.
It’s mostly an infrastructure issue. South Korea has lots of narrow alleyways that were built in the 1960s-1970s that were never intended to handle anywhere near the level of population density the major cities have today. Modernization efforts didn’t happen. Add in how many damn hills there are just about every where you walk, and what’s surprising is how rare crowd crushes are.
I’ve been in similar crowds in South Korea in narrow down sloped alleys before. In hindsight, that was quite potentially dangerous.
Anyone with a brain would have realized that it would have taken four policemen to ensure that the people were traversing the alleyway in one direction instead of two that night which eventually resulted in people getting stuck and not being able to get out.
The Mayor of Yongsan-gu is PPP so is the Mayor of Seoul. The police is being led by a PPP lackey.
It is no wonder that brainless planning and incompetence came together to create a tragic event.
All fingers are pointing to the PPP, and the Setnaffarists know that one wrong move and the whole house of cards will come down resulting in the return of a DPK government.
And obviously the Setnaffarists are going into overdrive and trying to defend the inaction of the PPP which led to the tragedy.
@Korean person
Most of that crowd was moving downward, because it was the fastest way to reach the main street. There are videos of that place a few hours before the tragedy that shows this.
Cops (or at least cops in America) usually don’t direct crowd in alleyways. They might be blocked off, but there aren’t cops positioned in all of them. In official city events, most cops would be on traffic roads, not on side walks. Crowd can be managed by blocking off certain roads herded to appropriate places.
There’s little cops could have done to stop some miscreants from pushing that massive crowd down an sloped alley, no more than they could have stopped someone from yelling “allah akbur” and creating mass panic. Once that many people came, the game changed. And if they were serious about reducing crowd size, logistics had to be planned days in advance.