Misleading: ‘Reckless’ police car in China was driven by intoxicated man, not duty officer
A Twitter user posted a video on Sept. 26 claiming that it shows a police car “running over pedestrians” in Jiangxi province, China.
The video features a law enforcement vehicle driving recklessly, almost hitting people and motorcycles on the road, and ramming into a three-wheel pickup truck at the end.
In the clip, some people, including a person in a police uniform, were seen trying to open the door of the moving car and stop the driver inside.
The tweet has been retweeted over 400 times and the video has been viewed more than 76,000 times as of this writing.
The claim, however, is misleading. This video shows an incident that took place three years ago and is taken out of context.
This footage was included in a news report by the Beijing Radio & Television Station (BRTV) on July 3, 2019.
The Twitter video is identical to the one in the BRTV news, but this version is longer and the clip included in the tweet appears to have been edited and shortened.
Annie Lab created a comparison video shown below:
According to the coverage, when a police officer arrived at the scene to resolve a dispute between a man and a woman, the man got into the police vehicle and tried to drive into the woman.
Local police published the details of the incident on its official Weibo page, which said at around 2 p.m. on July 3, 2019, an intoxicated man surnamed Guo in Huai’an city, Jiangsu province, seized the car while a police officer was trying to stop an altercation between the man and an unidentified woman.
He drove the police car into the crowd, hit a three-wheel truck, and caused damage to public facilities, said the official post.
Annie Lab could not independently verify the identities of the man and woman involved in the incident, but we can be certain that the video is not new and was filmed in Jiangsu province, not in Jiangxi as claimed by the Twitter user.
