경찰의 자살대응 실태 및 개선방안에 관한 연구

Abstract

South Korea has the highest suicide rate among OECD member countries in 2020. The government has actively responded by enacting the Suicide Prevention Act and establishing a dedicated department in the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The National Police Agency has also established the comprehensive policy to prevent suicide in 2018, but suicide rates has not decreaseed. This study conducted FGI(Focused Group Interview) on the status of the police's suicide response among the national suicide prevention policies, and suggested legal and institutional improvement measures. FGI were conducted on a total of 20 people, including 15 police officers who performed suicide response tasks and 5 people in charge of suicide prevention centers in local governments. As a result of FGI, the police recognized the suicide report cases as an 'incident they wanted to avoid'. It is a problem that the police are the main body and the local government who is legal entities is the cooperator at the suicide report site. There were difficulties in emergency hospitalization of suicide attempters, because cooperation with hospitals was not smooth. Until the attempt was handed over to the guardian, there were internal and external conflicts due to the lack of places and manpower to protect suicide attempts. The policy of the police's life-respecting cooperation officer was operating formally. There is a lack of networking between police and suicide prevention centers, and there was considered that there was no standard method for the linkage procedure. Based on the fact-finding survey, it proposed the institutionalization of accompanying police·firefighting·local governments, authorization of emergency rescue recipients to request communication information provision, relaxed legal basis for police entry into the house. It argued institutional improvement measures such as expanding emergency hospital designated hospitals, expanding emergency response infrastructure, establishing a standard system for support linkage. It is necessary to establish the roles and functions of life officers at police stations and to activate the network of suicide prevention officers. Finally, it is necessary to revitalize national R&D to respond to suicide.