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Lee Sang-min, the interior and safety minister facing impeachment proceedings, steps out of his home in Seoul’s Gangnam District on Feb. 9. (Yonhap)

Following South Korea’s National Assembly’s vote to impeach him on Wednesday for inappropriate behavior as a Cabinet member and a poor response to the Itaewon crowd crush last year, Minister of the Interior and Safety Lee Sang-min was suspended from his duties nine months after taking office.

Lee came to the attention of President Yoon Suk-yeol as a fellow alumnus of both Choongam High School and Seoul National University School of Law, which he entered four years after Yoon. Ever since he assumed the position of interior minister on May 13, his tenure has been plagued by scandal. He has been particularly criticized for his slapdash behavior and a series of astonishing gaffes.

Lee’s first order upon taking office was to set up an advisory committee to guide police reform. A month after its formation, the advisory committee released recommendations that included setting up a Police Bureau under the Interior and Safety Ministry and making rules for the interior minister’s oversight of the heads of the National Police Agency and the National Fire Agency.

The work of altering the basic framework of the police organization 31 years after the security headquarters was spun off from the old Interior Ministry as an independent National Police Agency in 1999 was handled at lightning speed under the logic that “someone ought to bring the police’s bloated authority under control.”

That move provoked sharp criticism from the legal community, the political establishment, and civil society that Lee was overstepping his authority and contravening the Government Organization Act, which removed public security from the interior minister’s portfolio, and the Police Act, which authorized the Korean National Police Commission to review and decide on major police policies. But such criticism went disregarded.

In the end, the Interior Ministry set up the Police Bureau in August 2022 and established rules for the interior minister’s oversight of the police and fire commissioners. That was when the opposition parties began to review the option of recommending Lee’s termination or passing a bill of impeachment against him.

Lee’s crude remarks have also come under public scrutiny. When he announced the plan to set up the Police Bureau on July 15, 2022, he said, “When the police fail to investigate cases of great interest to society or cases connected with senior members of the police, I’ll order them to carry out the investigation.” That led to Lee being pilloried for threatening the independence of police investigations.

In September, Lee stirred up another scandal when he told the Chosun Ilbo newspaper in an interview that the government would “seek to arrange for major universities, special-purpose high schools, and between three and five big conglomerates to relocate to the provinces before the end of Yoon Suk-yeol’s term in office.”

These public comments touched on an idea that hadn’t been cleared with the Ministry of Education or the universities in question and that Yoon had never mentioned in his campaign pledges, his 120-item agenda for government, or his work briefings. Lee’s remarks about relocating major universities opened himself up to criticism that he was trying to distract the public from the delayed launch of a commission in pursuit of the “provincial era,” which was supposed to serve as the policy hub for balancing development between Seoul and the provinces.

Some of Lee’s slips of the tongue have been unacceptable for the minister responsible for disaster safety, including those he made on Oct. 30, 2022, during the government’s first joint briefing after the deadly crowd crush in the Itaewon neighborhood of Seoul.

“Compared to the past, the crowds [in Itaewon] weren’t large enough to arouse concern. This wasn’t an issue that could have been resolved by deploying police or firefighters to the area in advance,” he said.

In effect, Lee was attempting to dodge responsibility for failing to prevent the disaster at a time when the exact circumstances of the accident remained unknown. That kindled public rage, prompting even figures in the ruling party to describe his remarks as “inappropriate.”

While Lee refrained from making public remarks for a time, he was soon embroiled in yet another controversy, barely a month later. “I suppose that anyone would want to fire off their resignation and get out of this situation,” he said in an interview with the Joongang Ilbo newspaper on Nov. 12, 2022, insisting that his refusal to step down was itself a responsible decision designed to help the country recover from the disaster.

By Kim Seon-sik, staff reporter

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