Old South Korean docuseries does not show 'police arresting man for heckling 2024 election candidate'
Scenes from a 2016 documentary about South Korean police patrols have been reshared in posts falsely claiming they show a Chinese man arrested for heckling a ruling party candidate in the capital Seoul during pivotal parliamentary elections in April 2024. There have been no official reports of arrests related to the obstruction of the candidate's election campaign as of April 29.
The claim was shared on Facebook on April 25, weeks after crucial parliamentary elections that the ruling People Power Party (PPP) lost by a landslide.
"Joseonjok arrested after heckling a People Power Party candidate in Daerim-dong," read the Korean-language post, alongside three photos appearing to show police making arrests and a fourth image of a PPP campaign truck.
Joseonjok is a term used to refer to ethnic Koreans with Chinese nationality -- thousands of whom have migrated to South Korea in search of work (archived link).
Seoul's Daerim-dong neighbourhood is home to approximately a quarter of the country's estimated 650,000 Korean-Chinese residents (archived links here and here).
According to an article in The Korea Herald, Chinese of Korean descent are a common target of discrimination and are often associated with violent crimes (archived link).
Some supporters of the ruling PPP have argued its candidates are disadvantaged in neighbourhoods with high Chinese populations, though past election data and fact-checks by local news organisations suggest otherwise (archived links here and here).
The same images and similar claims were shared elsewhere on Facebook here; as well as here and here on the South Korean forum Naver Band.
The images, however, were unrelated to the April 2024 elections.
2016 footage
A keyword search on Google found the images of the police making arrests were taken from the long-running docuseries "In the Line of Fire" aired by the country's public education broadcaster EBS (archived link).
The images came from the episode "Police Patrol Unit: Guardians of the Night", aired in 2016 and published on EBS' official YouTube channel (archived link).
The images in the false posts were stills taken from the episode's 11:35, 11:30 and 21:35 marks.
Below are screenshot comparisons between the images shared in a false context (left) and corresponding scenes from the original EBS documentary (right):
The pictured episode followed the activities of a mobile police unit during a busy evening in Daerim-dong in September 2016.
According to the documentary, the first two images show police subduing and arresting men who were involved in a fight, while the third image shows other officers detaining a man for carrying a knife.
There was no reference to elections or political candidates in the episode.
The film's narrator also mentioned the footage was captured during the Chuseok holiday season in September 2016 -- months after the country's last major elections in April 2016 (archived links here and here).
Election campaign photo
As of April 29, there were no official reports or police statements about arrests related to heckling or obstruction of any election campaign in Daerim-dong.
A reverse image search on Google found the fourth falsely shared image was used by the South Korean news organisation Dailyan on April 3, 2024 (archived link).
According to the caption, it shows PPP candidate Park Yong-chan campaigning in Daerim-dong on April 3.
Park was defeated by opposition Democratic Party lawmaker Kim Min-seok in the April 10 election (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison between the image shared in the false posts (left) and the photo published by Dailyan (right):
