경찰공무원 자살에 관한 연구 - 신문기사를 중심으로 -

Abstract

The purpose of this study are to search for the preventive measures on suicide committed by police officer through the analysis of its actual condition and to present the base information for more comprehensive and delicate future researches on police suicide. To achieve the goal, the data were collected from the 71 news articles related to the police suicide from January 2000 to December 2010 using the Korean Integrated Newspaper Database System and Korean major portal news site, and a content analysis was used to analyze the characteristics of police suicide. Male, 30s year old of age, rank of sergeant, and Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency affiliation took the majority of the suiciders in terms of the demographics. Regarding the characteristics of the suicides, the suicides occur largely in the winter whereas the fall took the lowest. The discoveries of the suicide were most frequent during 10am to 12pm, the acquaintances of the suiciders took the majority of the first finder, and the discovery site were most frequently the major life zone of the suiciders. In terms of the suicidal method, hanging was the most frequent followed by gun-firing, and the direct reasons for the suicide were psychological/psychiatric problems, family affairs, work/responsibility issues in descending order of the frequence. The 5.6% of the suiciders tried the suicides with other people, who are children, person of extramarital relationship, or the object of the one-sided love. Finally, the 40.8% of the cases left the note, which contained the feeling of sorry and regret. Based on the results, several suggestions were made as follows to prevent police suicide. First, the ways to resolve the majority of the suicidal reasons-psychological/psychiatric problems, family affairs, work/responsibility issues-should be established. Second, relating to the gun use, the characteristic suicidal method of the police officers, there should be a countermeasure related to the gun use control. Finally, as shown by the discovery site and the first finder, the care and support by the people around the police officers are also important. This study also has some limitations. The study method using the news articles limited its concreteness and keyword searching method might have excluded several articles from detection. Also, the articles might contain the journalists' unwarranted assumptions. Therefore, in the future studies, use of more objective information source would be helpful in clearer understanding of the police officers' suicide and factor analysis based on pragmatic data and systematic methodology is also required.