Police Eyes Senior Officers to Play Central Role in Stalking Cases, Considers Revision to Antistalking Law

The Yomiuri Shimbun

14:57 JST, September 5, 2025

The National Police Agency on Thursday instructed prefectural police headquarters to assign senior officers to oversee stalking cases, following the release of a report by Kanagawa Prefectural Police on their handling of a case in which a 20-year-old woman was apparently stalked and killed in Kawasaki.

The NPA also directed them all to establish unified management systems under which their community safety divisions, which handle reports by citizens, and criminal investigation sections will collaborate on personal safety cases such as stalking and domestic violence.

Noting that the Kanagawa Prefectural Police chief was informed of the incident only after the victim’s body was discovered, the NPA also demanded the establishment of mechanisms to ensure reports reach prefectural police chiefs’ desks in cases where a serious development may have occurred, such as when a possible stalking victim’s whereabouts cannot be ascertained. The NPA will create manuals tailored to the roles of senior officers, frontline police officers and others and disseminate them to prefectural police forces.

Legal reforms will also proceed. The NPA is considering asking for the Antistalking Law to be revised to introduce a system allowing police to issue warnings to perpetrators without being requested to do so by victims, as well as to regulate the misuse of tracking tags.

At a regular press conference on Thursday, when questioned about the prefectural police’s handling of the incident, NPA Commissioner General Yoshinobu Kusunoki said: “There were insufficient and inappropriate aspects [of how the case was handled] that deviated from the fundamentals. Such things must never happen again.”

The NPA will boost its oversight of prefectural police chiefs as a preventative measure.