Daegu Fails to Fill Vacant School Police Officer Positions

Youth crime in the Daegu region has reached a cumulative total of around 17,800 cases from 2021 through August 2026, with the number of offenders fluctuating around 3,000 per year without decreasing. The figures come from six years of data on youth crime in Daegu that Daegu City Councilor Kim Joo-beom obtained from the Daegu Autonomous Police Commission.

The School Police Officer (SPO) system, in which serving police officers are tasked with preventing juvenile crime and guiding at-risk youth, has been introduced. But Daegu's deployment stands at only 48 officers, and three SPO positions in the city remain unfilled — two at Dalseong Police Station and one at Gangbuk Police Station. In the jurisdictions of these two stations, each SPO covers two to three times as many schools as counterparts in other areas, placing a heavy burden on them.

The Daegu Autonomous Police Commission, which supervises and directs the Daegu Metropolitan Police Agency including personnel matters, has repeatedly ordered the vacant positions to be filled. Yet the police have not moved to fill them, citing other departments with more urgent staffing needs.

Councilor Kim Joo-beom pointed out that while youth protection and school violence prevention fall under autonomous police affairs, the actual officers and organization belong to the national police system. He said the SPO vacancy issue should prompt a review of whether the region's public safety needs are genuinely reflected in actual personnel deployment and on-the-ground response.