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Measuring Police Integrity Across the World pp 241–267Cite as

Police Integrity in South Korea

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Abstract

South Korea is an Asian democracy with the history of military and autocratic regimes. The police served the regimes and engaged in various forms of police misconduct, from the use of excessive force and violation of human rights to corruption. Recent reforms of the South Korean police primarily targeted police corruption and mostly neglected the use of excessive force. This chapter presents the results of the 2009 police integrity survey of 379 South Korean police officers. The respondents had no problems recognizing most of the behaviors described in the questionnaire as rule violating. The instances in which they had problems were mostly focused on the scenarios describing the use of excessive force. The respondents evaluated most of the scenarios as serious. They also expected, and approved of, some discipline milder than dismissal for such behavior. We uncovered a strong code of silence among our respondents that protects not only violations of official rules but also violations of criminal law. Our results indicate that the respondents’ own views about the described behavior and their estimates of how others would evaluate the same behavior are very similar. We argue that these results should be interpreted in light of the Confucianism and the collective culture of homogeneity widespread in South Korea.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Korean National Police University, Yongin-si, South Korea

    Wook Kang

  2. Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Sanja Kutnjak Ivković

Authors
  1. Wook Kang
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  2. Sanja Kutnjak Ivković
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wook Kang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

    Sanja Kutnjak Ivković

  2. City University of New York John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, New York, USA

    M.R. Haberfeld

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Kang, W., Kutnjak Ivković, S. (2015). Police Integrity in South Korea. In: Kutnjak Ivković, S., Haberfeld, M. (eds) Measuring Police Integrity Across the World. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2279-6_9

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