Campus police are an organization employed by the school to protect the students, faculty and members on campus. With a vast majority of its constituents living in dorms or spending night shifts performing research in laboratories, the campus police at KAIST have especially a lot on their shoulders. Even an interview time was hard to arrange, with constant work shifts and an emergency dispatch to the Department of Chemistry building causing the interview to be postponed several times. However, with the Korean peninsula being proclaimed as an earthquake danger zone and security issues consistently causing problems here and there in Korea, The KAIST Herald decided to interview one of the campus police members, Sung Don Kang. <p>

Could you briefly introduce yourself?

Yes. I’m Sung Don Kang and I joined Daeduk Development Co. since March 7, 1990. KAIST is a public institution and its policies are automatically sensitive to changes in government policies. When President Young-Sam Kim started his term in 1993, the campus police were outsourced to be run by private companies. The company given the contract was Daeduk Development Co. — the company I was working for — and naturally we started to work at KAIST.

Then when did you start working as a campus police?

I do not remember the exact date but started working as the campus police since 2002.

How does your day as campus police look like?

Well, we have a total of 10 members. Nine of them are in charge with police duties and we have one additional member for the bureaucracy. The nine of us work in a three-man shift plan. The first shift in the morning starts at 9 a.m. in the morning. We take care of the traffic during the commuting time. Then we go around campus to check if there are any anomalies with building entrances and windows of the buildings. We then attend to traffic again around 10:40 as students finish or go to classes. There are three major regions where we focus on traffic issues: near the Chung Moon Sool building (E16), the Creative Learning Building (E11), and near the main entrance. Two teams are mostly responsible for this. Then there is a third team which focuses mostly on fire prevention duties.

Apart from this, we also try to get of potential sources of danger as fast and safely as possible, keep bikes which are all over the school in an organized fashion, check for parking violations and make sure that drunk students walking on campus can safely return home during the night.

Could you please tell us about an instance where you felt good as a campus police?

Oh, that’s simple. There was once a thief at KAIST. I arrested him and got compensation for it.

Were there also hard times?

Yes, they come rather often. Especially when students don’t adhere to the traffic rules such as wearing helmets when driving scooters or when students drive vehicles such as scooters with no proper traffic plates on them. Also, we try to educate students about the right safety regulations needed when riding a bike on campus but it can be very hard to get everyone to cooperate in a school as large as KAIST.