Seoul crowd crush: local police offices raided in investigation

 Eleven emergency callers used Korean word for ‘crushed to death’ 13 times hours before incident

South Korea’s national police agency has raided local police departments in the capital, Seoul, and the city’s Yongsan district office as it investigates whether official ineptitude contributed to a crowd surge that killed 156 people in the neighbourhood of Itaewon.

The raids came a day after the agency acknowledged Seoul police failed to act for hours despite receiving at least 11 emergency calls from pedestrians warning about a swelling crowd of Halloween revellers getting out of control ahead of the crush on Saturday in a narrow alley near Hamilton Hotel.

11 110 (911) calls were made to the police and they were ignored leaving victims to find escape routes out of the growing crowd.  Additionally regular police aren't usually used for crowd control in Korea that task is left to the Riot Police.   Noksapyeong station is at the top of a hill just above the U.S. Armies old Yongsan Garrison.  

His agency also released the transcripts of 11 calls placed to the police’s 112 emergency hotline by pedestrians in Itaewon on Saturday, the first made at about 6.30pm, four hours before the crush near Hamilton Hotel.

The unidentified caller, who was near a shop in the alley where the crush occurred, pleaded for police to enforce controls on the area because “too many people are going up and down and it’s too scary”.

“People aren’t able to come down but (people) are also pushing up and I think (they) could get crushed to death,” the caller said.

In South Korea Sexism Is Doing Just Fine

South Korea is so male dominated that's almost impossible to realize they elected Park Geun hye President.  But, not worry then men are fighting back. For last several months thousands of women have gathered in central Seoul to protest against all types of sexual abuse they must endure. Somehow the tone deaf, ignorant and misogynistic assholes heading the National Police Agency and the Seoul Public Prosecutors office seem unable or unwilling to extricate their  collective heads from their collective asses.

Thousands of women protesting over an epidemic of  illegal spy cam videos being uploaded to the internet and what do these fools focus on? Why the one woman who surreptitiously photographed a nude male model from art school who then posted the photograph online.   

A South Korean court has taken the rare step of jailing a woman for secretly photographing a male nude model, in a case that has sparked accusations of sexism and double standards.

The 25-year-old woman, identified only by her surname Ahn, was sentenced to 10 months in prison by the Seoul western district court and ordered to undergo 40 hours of counselling on sexual violence.

South Korea is in the midst of an epidemic of spycam pornography, where victims are secretly filmed in places such as toilet stalls and changing rooms. A series of monthly protests in Seoul have drawn tens of thousands of people.

The number of spycam crimes reported to police surged from around 1,100 in 2010 to more than 6,500 last year. It is thought many crimes go unreported.

Of the 16,201 people arrested between 2012 and 2017 for making illegal recordings, 98% were men, including school teachers, college professors, church pastors and police officers. Of the 26,000 recorded victims over that period, 84% were women.