Tag: GI Crime

It has been quiet on the GI crime front until this past weekend:

A United States Forces Korea (USFK) service member was arrested after causing an accident while driving under the influence with a stolen vehicle, police said Monday. 
  
According to the Goyang Police Precinct, a USFK soldier in their 20s deployed at a base in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi, stole a car in Mapo District, western Seoul, between Saturday night and early Sunday. 
  
The soldier drove the stolen car and hit two vehicles, including a truck, while they were waiting for the traffic light to change at 6:17 a.m. Sunday.

Police apprehended the soldier after the crash. 
  
Two people were injured in the accident, according to the police. 
  
The soldier was found to have stolen a parked car, in which the owner left their keys, after drinking alcohol in the Hongdae area.

Joong Ang Ilbo via a reader tip

You can read more at the link.

You have to like how this article published by Yonhap makes it seem like there was rampant crime caused by service members at Yongsan Garrison:

he pullout of the headquarters of the United States Forces Korea (USFK) from the Yongsan base in the heart of Seoul in June 2018 has created a bittersweet aftermath in the central Seoul district over the past year.

On the bright side, the Yongsan area around the former USFK compound has seen a steep fall in the number of assaults and other crimes committed by American service personnel and civilian workers and their families.

On the flip side, merchants in Itaewon and other commercial areas close to former USFK facilities have suffered a steep drop in customers and sales. (……..)

Police and residents have said the reduced number of American soldiers and crimes involving them in the Yongsan area were the most noticeable change in the past year.

According to data from the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office, the number of criminal offenses committed by USFK members filed in Seoul in relation to the Status of Forces Agreement fell 18.5 percent from 119 cases in 2017 to 97 in 2018. In the first five months of this year, there were a mere 25 cases.

“American soldiers used to frequently cause trouble during their visits to Itaewon, which has a lot of bars. After the relocation of USFK facilities, U.S. military-related incidents and accidents have significantly decreased,” said a police officer.

Another officer from the Yongsan Police Station said, “Until two years ago, police officers frequently traveled to airports to take custody of USFK soldiers caught attempting to leave the country with gun magazines and other illegal possessions. But there have been very few such reports after the relocation of the U.S. base.”

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but 119 criminal cases in 2017 does not tell me much. Were the majority of these parking tickets and traffic citations which have been used in the past to inflate the GI crime rate? As I have always said statistics showing convictions for major crimes is the best way to determine what the GI crime rate really is.

As far as traveling to the airport this makes no sense because the soldiers just moved south to Camp Humphreys. The soldiers are still there so if illegal possessions at the airport was a problem before it should still be a problem now, though I have never heard of anyone getting arrested for a gun magazine at the airport.

The rest of the article goes on with the usual complaints about how Yongsan Garrison is basically a toxic waste dump preventing the creation of Seoul’s version of Central Park. Of course the article made no mention of the fact that Yongsan Garrison has below average soil pollution levels.

I have been saying this for quite some time now, expect every petty USFK crime to now receive attention from the Korean media:

Two United States Forces Korea soldiers were caught stealing clothes from a shop in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, police said Saturday.

They entered the shop at 11 p.m. Friday, and fled with a jacket priced at 60,000 won ($54), according to Gwangju Dongbu Police Station. Officers, called by the shop’s manager, traced the two and apprehended them.

The two suspects, from an air base in Gyeonggi Province, remained tight-lipped, refusing to answer questions from investigators.

Police are reviewing CCTV footage to help them in their investigation.  [Korea Times]

This is not something that should make national news, but like we saw during the 2000-2008 timeframe every USFK petty crime made the news to help create the perception of out of control GI crime.  It was common for Koreans to think USFK personnel could commit crimes and fly away back to the US.  This caused protests and demands for SOFA revisions.

I long ago showed the problems with the anti-US activists complaints about the US-ROK SOFA and I am still awaiting for one person to point out an example of a crime committed by a GI off duty and the USFK refused to hand him over?  The anti-US activists keep complaining about GI’s getting away with crimes and can’t point out a specific example of when this happened.

With the leftists emboldened every GI crime incident now has the potential to be blown up in the media.  So far this one has been kept pretty low key considering it happened back on April 1st and we are hearing about it now:

An American soldier faces a charge for sexual assault, the Gangnam Police Station said Monday. The soldier, part of the United States Forces Korea stationed at Osan Air Base in Gyeonggi Province, allegedly raped a woman after taking her to a hotel at 7:30 a.m. near a club where they met in Gangnam, April 1.

According to police, the woman had been intoxicated when she was taken to the hotel and then raped. She reported the incident to the police the same day, claiming she believed she was raped.

After about a month-long police investigation, in which the police analyzed video footage from the club and hotel, the police identified the soldier as the culprit. The police summoned the suspect for questioning June 17 and indicted him June 20, following the protocol of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), a mutual defense treaty between Korea and the U.S.  [Korea Times]

Just like with all the other criminal cases involving US GI’s this soldier will be prosecuted through the Korean court system and if found guilty will be put in Korean prison.  It will be interesting to see in the coming months if the currently emboldened anti-US groups in Korea will try to revive the narrative that GIs are committing all these crimes and then flying home with no punishment.

These idiots just never learn that Korean customs inspects the military mail and many people have been caught and arrested for mailing drugs into Korea:

Prosecutors on Wednesday arrested U.S. soldiers and their Korean accomplices for smuggling bags of philopon methamphetamines worth 13.6 billion won ($11.9 million).

Suwon District Prosecutors’ Office arrested an American private, 20, and two Korean-Americans for infringing Korean narcotics laws. Prosecutors also booked without arrest another American private, 20, stationed at K-6 base in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, for providing an address to where the contraband could be sent.

They are also searching for four Korean-Americans.

An accomplice in California sent the drugs to Korea in December, prosecutors claim.

They weighed 4.1 kilograms ― enough for 130,000 users.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but I hope they are sentenced to the maximum penalty allowed by Korean law.

Considering that the suspect is an ethnic Korean it will be interesting to see if the Korean media tries to keep a low key approach to this case or not:

An American soldier of Korean ethnicity has been charged with raping a Korean woman at a Busan guesthouse.

Busan Jungbu police have charged the man, 21, with raping the woman, 24.

The soldier, from a U.S. Forces Korea camp in Gyeonggi Province, made the woman’s acquaintance through an online dating app.

On Feb. 18, he met her in person in Busan while on a brief vacation. At about 4:30 a.m., after they had been drinking, the soldier took her to a guesthouse, where he allegedly raped her.

Police said the man had denied the charge.

The police plan to refer the case to U.S. military police, who will deal with it according to the Status of Forces Agreement between Seoul and Washington.  [Korea Times]

Obviously these two knuckleheads are not readers of the ROK Drop because if they were they would know that smuggling drugs through the US military mail is now an easy way to get yourself arrested:

Two 2nd Infantry Division soldiers have been indicted in connection with a $10 million methamphetamine smuggling case involving the U.S. military postal service, officials said Wednesday.

The shipment of nearly eight pounds of meth — in three packages with labels saying they contained candy — was discovered in late October by the customs service at the Incheon airport near Seoul.

Authorities then monitored the shipment and detained the soldiers, both 19, for questioning days later when they moved to collect it.

The men were indicted Tuesday on charges of violating the narcotics control act.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link, but these two were getting paid $3,000 and $1,000 for agreeing to have the drugs mailed to them on behalf of a Korean-American in Uijongbu who denying all the charges.

Via a reader tip comes news that ROK government held a meeting with USFK to address changes they want made to the US-ROK Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA):

South Korea and the United States on Tuesday had a joint committee meeting to discuss various issues on their agreement governing the legal status of American forces stationed in South Korea, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Tuesday.

The 197th joint committee meeting of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which defines areas of legal responsibility of the 28,000-strong U.S. soldiers here, was held at the foreign ministry in Seoul. The SOFA meeting is held once or twice a year, and this was the first time since last December that South Korea and the U.S. officials convened.

The foreign ministry said Yeo Seung-bae, the foreign ministry’s director-general for North America and his counterpart Thomas Bergeson, deputy commander of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), touched on issues such as education of American forces on local law and customs, the USFK’s stable employment of South Korean workers and environmental problems near the U.S. bases here.

The ministry added that the two sides also talked about implementation measures taken after a live anthrax sample from a U.S. military laboratory was shipped to a local military base by mistake and caused alarm bells to go off in the country last year.

The meeting took place before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump — one of whose campaign pledges was to have allies, including South Korea, pay more for American troops stationed in those countries — took over the White House.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but the ROKs are still complaining about the oil leak issue in the Seoul subway system they have been blaming on Yongsan Garrison for years now.  You would think if the oil leak was coming from Yongsan they would have found it by now.  The other thing in the article that caught my attention was that they are still complaining about GI crimes.  The article even states that the US military crime rate has steadily dropped since 2010 from an already extremely low crime rate compared to the surrounding Korean population.

You can read more about the US-ROK SOFA at the below link:

https://www.rokdrop.net/2008/02/gi-myths-the-unfair-us-rok-sofa-agreement/

Here is another example of a race baiting article being pushed by the media insinuating that the poor black soldier in this article that could not afford an attorney is some how getting treated unfairly compared to the white soldier who’s family could afford a civilian attorney.  The article claims they committed similar crimes and received very different sentences.  However, upon closer scrutiny the two crimes were very different and tried in different court systems thus different outcomes not that facts matter in click bait articles like this:

Two soldiers from the same Joint Base Lewis-McChord infantry battalion experienced two very different kinds of justice when they came home from training events a year apart and carried out deadly crimes.

Pvt. Jeremiah Hill, prosecuted in Army court, received a sentence of 45 years in prison for knifing another soldier in the heart on a Lakewood street.

The rookie soldier from a poor Chicago family had an Army-provided defense attorney and rarely showed remorse when he testified.

Spc. Skylar Nemetz, prosecuted in Pierce County Superior Court, last week received a sentence of less than 14 years for causing the death of his wife, Danielle, when he accidentally shot her in the head with a rifle.

His Northern California family reached deep into their savings to hire an experienced private attorney. Nemetz wept on the witness stand and persuaded a jury he didn’t mean to kill his wife.

The disparities in outcomes for two soldiers from the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment show the differences in what can happen when the Army and Pierce County carry out their informal agreement to decide which agency should prosecute soldiers who commit crimes outside of JBLM. [News Tribune]

You can read the rest at the link to learn the details of each case.