The National Police Agency decided Wednesday to take disciplinary action against senior officials of the Kanagawa Prefectural Police Department for a series of wrongdoings among its ranks and alleged attempts to cover them up, NPA sources said.
Kanagawa police head Takeo Miyama, Eiji Nakabayashi, the department's personnel and training bureau chief, and some other senior officials will be reprimanded for insufficiently investigating the incidents and failing to properly report them to the public, the sources said.
The NPA is to take disciplinary action as early as today after receiving approval from the National Public Safety Commission, they said.
The NPA is expected to move unusually quickly, taking action without waiting for the completion of ongoing investigations into the cases of wrongdoing in the force. In one case, an officer attempted to blackmail a woman for sexual favors. Another case involves violence within police ranks.
All the scandals, however, may eventually lead to Miyama's resignation, as the NPA believes he and other top officials did not require full investigations into the incidents despite being aware of them.
When it was made public earlier this month that patrolmen at Atsugi Police Station had abused new recruits, Kanagawa police initially said they could not confirm whether a pistol and handcuffs had been used in the incidents. Two days later, however, they admitted to their use.
Meanwhile, an initial report on the sex case did not mention blackmail. It said simply that a Sagamihara-Minamai police officer conducted an investigation using a "memo and other things." But it was later revealed that the officer used police evidence -- photo negatives of a woman with a gang member -- to try to blackmail the woman into having sexual relations with him.