자치경찰제 도입의 법적 쟁점과 과제

Abstract

The autonomous police system means the perfunctory and institutional completion of the local government system, because maintaining order in society is the most basic premise for administration to be efficient. For this reason, discussions on the introduction of the autonomous police system have been frequent since the full-fledged implementation of the local government system, and attempts to legislate have also existed constantly. Nevertheless, legislation was repeatedly thwarted for various social and political reasons, finally, by passing the National Assembly the Act on the Organization and Operation of National Police and Autonomous Police on December 22, 2020, the autonomous police system was introduced in earnest. The maintenance of security and order in the district of a local government is a typical spatial element, which is related to the area, and therefore, the local police affairs are local affairs and should therefore be regarded as autonomous affairs in the eyes of local laws. Therefore, it is a natural normative request that autonomy should be guaranteed for the autonomous police system through the so-called guarantee of full authority and self-responsibility, just like local autonomy. Nevertheless, the autonomous police system introduced under the current law is far from the normative ideological self-governing police system, because it is only in the form of affairs that local police affairs is carried out through still the national police organization, it is only a "distribution" of the police authority, and it is difficult to call it "autonomous.“ However, it is true that police action has different characteristics from general administrative action, and also the poor reality of local autonomy in Korea is inappropriate for the introduction of radical and ideal autonomous police system. In that respect, the autonomous police system introduced under the current legislation should be seen as a transitional variant considering the reality of Korea, which is a process for the introduction of an ideal self-governing police system. After all, if the current autonomous police system is a second-best effort due to consideration of the poor reality of local autonomy, the important legal task ahead is to strive for institutional settlement as a Korean-style autonomous police system, and the goal should be to realize the ideology of the autonomous police system under the current incomplete autonomous police system. The normative direction is, of course, to ensure the participation of residents, the essential ideology of local autonomy, and to meet the needs of residents' security as much as possible from a democratic point of view.