SEOUL, Nov 1, 2022 (BSS/AFP) - South Korea's police chief said Tuesday that
officers had received multiple urgent reports of danger ahead of a deadly
crowd crush at a Halloween event but their handling of them was
"insufficient".

At least 156 mostly young people were killed, and scores more injured, in a
deadly crowd surge late Saturday at the first post-pandemic Halloween party
in Seoul's popular Itaewon nightlife district.

An estimated 100,000 people had flocked to the area, but because it was not
an "official" event with a designated organiser, neither the police nor local
authorities were actively managing the crowd.

"There were multiple reports to the police indicating the seriousness at the
site just before the accident occurred," national police chief Yoon Hee-keun
said.

Police knew "a large crowd had gathered even before the accident occurred,
urgently indicating the danger," he said, acknowledging the way this
information was handled had been "insufficient".

South Korea is typically strong on crowd control, with protest rallies often
so heavily policed that officers can outnumber participants.

But in the case of the Itaewon Halloween festivities, there was no designated
event organiser, with people flocking to the area to attend events held by
individual bars, clubs and restaurants.

Police said they had deployed 137 officers to Itaewon for Halloween -- but
6,500 officers were present at a protest across town that was only attended
by about 25,000 people, local reports said.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said Tuesday the country needed to
urgently improve its system for managing large crowds in the wake of the
disaster.

"The safety of the people is important, whether or not there is an event
organiser," he told a cabinet meeting.

He called for the country to develop "cutting-edge digital capabilities" to
improve crowd management -- but critics claim such tools already exist and
were not deployed in Itaewon.

- Disaster was avoidable -

Seoul's City Hall has a real-time crowd monitoring system that uses mobile
phone data to predict crowd size, but it was not employed Saturday night,
local media reported.

Itaewon's district authorities also did not deploy any safety patrols, with
officials saying the Halloween event was considered "a phenomenon" rather
than "a festival", which would have required an official plan for crowd
control.

On the night, tens of thousands of people thronged a narrow alleyway, with
eye-witnesses describing how, with no police or crowd control in sight,
confused partygoers pushed and shoved, crushing those trapped in the lane.

Analysts say this was easily avoidable, even with only a small number of
police officers.

"Good, safe crowd management is not about the ratio, but about the crowd
strategy -- for safe crowd capacity, flow, density," said G. Keith Still, a
crowd science professor at the University of Suffolk.

South Korean expert Lee Young-ju said that if local police knew they would be
short-handed, they could have sought help from local authorities or even
residents or shop owners.

"It's not just the numbers," Lee, a professor from the Department of Fire and
Disaster at the University of Seoul, told AFP.

"The question is, how did they manage with the limited number (of police) and
what kind of measures did they take to make up for it."