South Korean authorities apologized on Tuesday after the deadly Halloween stampede in Seoul, deeming the police reaction “insufficient” despite multiple alerts.
The police knew “that a large crowd had gathered even before the accident occurred, signaling danger urgently”, acknowledged the national police chief Yoon Hee-keun.
Emergency calls, made several hours before the disaster and of which the South Korean news agency News1 published transcripts, were already alerting to the large number of people present at the scene.
“There are too many people here being pushed, stepped on, hurt. It’s chaotic. You have to control that, ”explained a person to the police at 8:09 p.m. local time, almost two hours before the tragedy.
The head of the national police considered “insufficient” the way in which this information had been treated.
“I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize to the public for this accident, as the minister in charge of personal security,” Interior Minister Lee Sang-min told parliament before to bow their heads in contrition in front of elected officials and the cameras.
At least 156 people, mostly young people, were killed, and dozens injured, in a crowd on Saturday night during the first Halloween party since the pandemic in Seoul’s cosmopolitan Itaewon district.
About 100,000 people were expected, but due to the unofficial nature of the event, neither the police nor the local authorities actively managed the crowd.
Police acknowledged on Monday that they only deployed 137 officers to Itaewon on Saturday evening, while stressing that this figure was higher than those for Halloween parties in previous years.
Meanwhile, 6,500 police officers were mobilized for another demonstration in the South Korean capital in which only 25,000 people participated, according to local media, in a country where the numerous and frequent demonstrations are often framed by a number of agents greater than that of participants.
But in the case of the Halloween festivities in Itaewon, there was no designated organizer. Partygoers gathered to attend different events in bars, clubs and restaurants.
Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon issued a public apology, tearfully saying he felt “infinitely responsible for this accident”.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said on Tuesday that his country urgently needs to improve its crowd management system.
“Personal safety is important,” he said. “Whether or not there is an organizer at an event,” he said at a government meeting.
Mr Yoon called on the country to acquire “advanced digital skills” to improve its crowd management.
But observers have said that these tools already exist and have not been used in Itaewon.
The disaster could have been avoided
Seoul City Hall has a real-time crowd monitoring system that uses cellphone data to predict the size of an event’s attendance, but it was not used on Saturday night, according to media reports. local.
Itaewon district authorities also failed to deploy security patrols, with officials saying the Halloween event was considered a “phenomenon” rather than a “festival”, which would have necessitated a official crowd control plan.
That night, tens of thousands of people rushed into an alley.
Eyewitnesses described how disoriented revelers pushed and shoved, crushing those trapped.
According to analysts, this situation could have been easily avoided, even with a small number of police officers.
“Good and safe crowd management is not about ratios, it’s about crowd strategy — for safe capacity, flow and density” of crowds, said G. Keith Still, professor of crowd science at the University of Suffolk.
For South Korean expert Lee Young-ju, if the police knew they were short-staffed, they could have asked local authorities, or even residents or shop owners, for help.
“It’s not just the numbers,” the professor at Seoul University’s fire and disaster department told AFP.
“The question is how did they manage with this limited number (of police officers) and what kind of measures they took to compensate” for the lack of personnel, he said.
The day after the tragedy, critics rocketed on social networks against the police, accused of having allowed too many people to gather around Itaewon metro station and in the alleys where the deadly stampede took place. .