[Survive & Thrive] S. Korea's safest cities? Data blackout clouds the picture

Safety ranks high on the list of priorities for South Korean and foreign residents alike when choosing where to live in the country. But despite extensive online access to public records, assessing the relative security of specific Korean cities and neighborhoods remains a surprisingly challenging task.

For starters, Korea generally presents an impressive safety profile, with homicide rates ranging from 0.5 to 0.6 per 100,000 residents according to the latest estimates from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the World Bank.

This figure hovers around one-tenth of the global average and is lower than most other developed countries, including Australia, Canada and Sweden. The United States State Department's 2023 Crime and Safety Report affirms these reassuring numbers, noting Korea's "low violent crime rate" and "very safe" environment for most visitors.

However, as in any country, safety levels inevitably vary across localities — a nuance that proves unexpectedly difficult to discern here due to a notable dearth of publicly accessible, neighborhood-level crime data.

Shifting sands of safety metrics

A quick search online in Korean for the "safest cities to live in" in Korea reveals a host of articles based on the Ministry of the Interior and Safety’s "regional safety index,” announced earlier this year.

These reports crown five regions — Uiwang, Hanam and Yongin in Gyeonggi Province; Gyeryong in South Chungcheong Province; and Buk-gu in Ulsan — as Korea's safest places to live.

Released annually since 2015, the ministry's safety index ranks cities across six categories: crime safety, traffic safety, fire safety, everyday accidents, infectious diseases and suicides.

Another commonly cited ranking is the Korea Security Index. This index, a joint effort by three university-affiliated research institutes, identifies Gwacheon in Gyeonggi Province, Sejong and Seoul's Seocho-gu as the top three safest localities. Notably, none of the three made the cut on the Interior Ministry's list.

The differing results highlight the challenge of defining “urban safety,” with many indexes using a wide range of criteria, varying standards and different scoring systems to assess city safety.

While this comprehensive approach has its merits, it may not fully address the concerns of ordinary residents — and of the specific reader who inquired — who are often most concerned with violent crime when evaluating a neighborhood’s safety.

Then the question arises: where is the actual crime data?

Raw crime data elusive

Oddly though, none of the frequently cited safety indexes show detailed crime data for each area, offering instead only general ratings without revealing the actual statistics.

Regarding this, an official at the Interior Ministry told The Korea Herald that they are legally prohibited from disclosing detailed crime data obtained from law enforcement.

Some raw data on crime is available to the public, through annual reports from the National Police Agency and the Supreme Prosecutors' Office. Accessible online through the agencies' official websites, these reports serve as the primary source for most government reports and academic research, including the ministry’s safety index.

The police and prosecutor's office by and large work with the same raw data and differ only in how they process it. Local police stations submit records of all charged cases from their jurisdictions to compile the initial dataset. This is issued in a report that breaks down the statistics by region, type of crime and various demographic factors.

The prosecutor's office then takes this information, combines it with its own investigative data and produces a more comprehensive nationwide analysis.

The problem is that even these statistics stop short of allowing for meaningful neighborhood-level comparisons. The police data only provides gross totals by city (si) and district (gu) without offering standardized per capita figures, making it challenging to interpret without additional effort to account for population size.

This year marked the first time the police offered crime statistics down to the district level in its annual report, a National Police Agency official told The Herald. The official said that the agency has no plans at this point to provide further breakdowns to the neighborhood level in future reports, however.

The official declined to specify whether the agency produces more detailed localized data that is not made public or if such data does not exist.

The prosecution's report, on the other hand, does offer per capita crime rates, but only for the country's 17 major provinces and metropolitan cities -- a scope too broad for evaluating specific areas.

According to this report, Jeju topped the list with the highest number of per capita criminal charges in 2022, recording approximately 4,052 cases per 100,000 residents. At the other end of the spectrum, Ulsan had the lowest rate, with 1,597 cases per 100,000.

Public perception obsession produces inertia

The lack of readily accessible detailed crime data in Korea is unlike other developed countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, where highly specific, up-to-date crime data is widely disclosed to the public. Government agencies and private companies both offer interactive maps and crime tracking tools in these countries, allowing people to view detailed crime statistics for individual neighborhoods in real time.

Jang Hyun-seok, a professor of police administration at Gyeonggi University, told The Herald that he was perplexed at the difficulty of obtaining detailed information for his research. For him, who earned his Ph.D. in the US studying crime patterns in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the stark contrast in data accessibility between the two countries is all too apparent.

"In the US, I could easily access detailed crime data for my research," Jang said. "Here, I can barely get my hands on any of it."

"I've filed multiple requests for data access, but the police always turned them down," he said. "All of us researchers are in the same boat."

As one possible reason behind this reluctance, experts pointed to widespread concerns about neighborhood reputation among the residents, which is closely tied to property values.

"Housing prices are a big deal here," Jang said. "People get really worked up if they think crime news might tank their property values." He cited an instance where a colleague faced a backlash from local groups after naming a specific neighborhood in crime-related research.

Park Cheol-hyun, a professor of police administration at Dongui University, suggested that the law enforcement’s tight-lipped approach may be driven by worries about public perception and potential calls to shift resources.

"If detailed crime statistics were made public, it would mean extra work for law enforcement," Park said. "People might start asking tough questions about why some neighborhoods are safer than others, or demand that resources be shifted to higher-crime areas. These are complex issues that go beyond just policing."

Park added that officials are hesitant not to break existing norms or upset the public. "Government officials rarely stick their necks out," he said. "It's just how the bureaucracy operates."

Lack of transparency reinforces prejudices, obscures actual crime

While the concern that releasing detailed crime data might unfairly stigmatize certain neighborhoods is understandable, keeping this information under wraps could actually make things worse.

Without hard facts to rely on, people are left to rely on rumors and anecdotes, which can quickly spiral into fearmongering and scapegoating. This is especially true when the lack of transparency is coupled with xenophobic sentiments and urban legends, perpetuated by sensationalist media portrayals and popular narratives.

Take, for example, Seoul's Daerim-dong area, which local media frequently paints as a hotbed for criminal gangs due to its relatively large population of Korean Chinese residents. This portrayal has spooked many Koreans into seeing the neighborhood as "dangerous," even though there's no credible data to support such fears.

With no publicly available data on crime in the area, baseless stereotypes about the neighborhood continue to circulate unchecked across popular culture.

Instead of protecting communities, experts also point out, withholding sensitive data may undermine public safety by getting in the way of crucial research on crime prevention. The current lack of transparency not only leaves citizens unable to make informed decisions about their safety, but also seriously limits scholars' ability to conduct studies that could help reduce crime and improve policing strategies, experts told The Herald.

This data blackout, experts say, could hamstring effective policymaking that relies on targeted, data-driven crime prevention strategies. Without a clear picture of where and when crimes are happening, it becomes nearly impossible for researchers to develop and evaluate evidence-based solutions.

"Evidence-based practices like hot spots policing are commonplace in other developed countries," Jang explained. "These criminal justice practices identify crime-concentrated areas and then target them with increased police presence and specific interventions."

"They're widely accepted elsewhere, but they're a nonstarter here because we simply don't have the granular data to make them work."

Jang acknowledges the sensitive nature of the issue, noting that when such data becomes public, people may use the numbers to pit neighborhoods against each other and fuel comparisons as to which areas are "better." Despite these concerns, he believes it's no reason to keep researchers from accessing the data for their studies.

"We can't even begin to study which policies actually reduce crime because we can't get our hands on local data," Jang said. "So we're left relying on studies from abroad or just looking at how afraid people are of crime, rather than the reality on the ground. We're quite literally in the dark here."

Experts say that in various cities in major developed countries like Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, UK and US, decisions about funding major crime prevention programs often hinge on rigorous testing in specific areas. The lack of empirical testing makes it tough for the government to allocate resources efficiently, Park told The Herald.

"We're putting policies in place without really knowing their long-term impact," he said. "It flies in the face of transparent governance. Basically, we're spending taxpayer money without the necessary research to back it up."

"I get that there are privacy concerns at play,” he added. “But I don't see the harm in sharing crime statistics, as long as they're accurate."