Syngman Rhee
On July 20, 1948, Rhee was elected president of the Republic of Korea in the South Korean presidential election, 1948 with 92.3% of the vote; the second candidate, Kim Gu, received 6.7% of the vote. On August 15, the Republic of Korea was formally established in South Korea and Rhee was inaugurated as the first President of the Republic of Korea. The next month, on September 9, the north also proclaimed statehood as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Rhee himself had been an independence activist, and his relations with the "chinilpa" Korean elites who had collaborated with the Japanese were, in the words of the South Korean historian Kyung Moon Hwang, often "contentious," but in the end an understanding was reached in which, in exchange for their support, Rhee would not purge the elites. In particular, the Koreans who had served in the colonial-era National Police, whom the Americans had retained after August 1945, were promised by Rhee that their jobs would not be threatened by him. Upon independence in 1948, 53% of South Korean police officers were men who had served in the National Police during the Japanese occupation.
Hong Jin-ki
After Korea was liberated from Japan on 15 August 1945, the Special Committee for Prosecution of Anti-National Offenders (banmin teukwi, 반민특위) had been established to purge and prosecute the pro-Japanese who worked for the Japanese colonial government. However, all efforts were hampered and dissolved by Dr. Syngman Rhee, the first president of South Korea, who had to depend on the pro-Japanese to establish his regime. 
As a result of Dr. Rhee's political schemes, many pro-Japanese as well as Hong Jin-Ki could cut their ways of what they have done during the Japanese rule, resulting in the empowerment and reinstatement of the pro-Japanese officials, armies and police.