The recent murder in Suwon has brought the 112 emergency service under fire, as police failed to find a 28-year-old woman for 13 hours after she called for a help.

She was brutally murdered on April 1 despite calling with a specific location hours earlier.

The case has prompted an outpouring of criticism of the 112 emergency hotline’s tracking ability and lack of a detailed search manual.

Under the current location information protection law, the 112 hotline is not allowed to track a caller’s location without getting a warrant or the caller’s approval.

In order for a police officer to trace a caller’s location, they need the caller’s permission. Only after consent is given are police able to activate Global Positioning System tracking system and ask a telephone company to send the caller’s location to a nearby police station.

But experts say the procedure is too complex and has too many steps to locate an exact spot in an emergency situation.

Even if police receive a report, they are likely to resort to conventional search practices such as door-to-door searches or a random search of suspects on the street, because they lack a manual for tracking people down other than the general guide for going on patrol.

The National Police Agency created a location tracking smartphone application last May, but the app is not widely known of.

There have been only 140 reports filed through the application from June until March this year, as few people are aware the system exists.

Police said they did not put much effort in promoting it, citing technological glitches.

Police can access location signals from GPS-enabled smartphones, but the signal can only be transferred to the Seoul office even if the calls were made in other provinces because the system that can handle reports from smartphone application is only installed at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency.

Police said they do not have enough resources either to handle reports from the smartphone application. There is a shortage of staff even at the 112 emergency call centers.

Police officers are also not properly trained for the hotline calls.

A 26-year-old man who used to work at the emergency call center of a local police station told a local daily that he took hotline calls on behalf of police officers who were busy preparing for promotion exams.

A law which allows police to track phone locations in emergency situations was submitted to the parliament in April, 2010, but is still pending.

By Lee Woo-young  (wylee@heraldcorp.com)