This is a new topic resulting from a thread Mike started about a movie he saw he said depicted GIs as nothing but a bunch of rabid criminals.

I've had this conversation with hundreds of Korean adult students (generally aged 25-35 but some older and some university students) over the years and with a good number of expats, and I am not going to rehash all my opinions about it here --- Instead, I want to request people keep some of these things in mind when coming across the topic.

1. Does the level of opinion of the other person (a Korean or an "understanding" expat) match the knowledge they have on the topic?

Just ask questions. Don't take everything you hear as gospel.

2. What is Korean night-life like?

3. What does the Korean system normally do when it is a Korean-on-Korean crime?

4. What usually happens in the US with such crimes?

If a Korean, like, say, the editor of the Korea Times, the #1 or #2 English language paper in the nation and part of a media conglomerate, writes an article (as he did a couple of years ago) saying that the DUI Fatality case was going to be "the first time" a GI criminal would ever face Korean justice in a Korean court --- it is not OK --- nor is it understandable.

It is a bleeping lie - and ignorance - especially for a news person - isn't an excuse.

The first two GIs convicted in Korean court was for rape in 1967. And trials have been routine as long as I've been paying attention to Korea (1995) and as far back as I've been able to adequately look.

It also gets me when expats (or Koreans) talk about 20 something year old GIs going to clubs, getting drunk, and chasing women.

Isn't that what Korean 20 somethings do as well as those around the world?

Maybe there are differences in how it is done. I really didn't hang around with GIs or in GI spots.

I did go to Korean clubs. And I would tentatively say 20 something year old Americans in the college towns I knew in the States were much more likely to have a fight break out at some point than what I saw in Korea.

I think Koreans are more confrontational than American adults - perhaps not Americans in their early 20s though - but Americans are much faster to start throwing punches. It always amazed me how drunk Korean office men or workers would scream at each other and push and pull on clothing, but nobody would throw a punch.

(On the other hand, Korean women are more likely to slap and pull hair than what I've seen in the US)

But, as far as getting dead drunk and trying hard to get laid, I have found that has been the same whereever I've been with young adults.

And in Korea, it doesn't stop at 35. I haven't been to many GI areas, but have you been to entertainment areas where Korean college students or where older Korean adults go?

The drinking culture in Korea is stronger than in the US and so is the group culture. And so is the prostitution culture.

So, if we are going to start throwing stones at GIs for hitting the clubs and getting shit-faced ------- you had better pick up a few more to sling at Korea too.

(Having said that, I wish more GIs and expat teachers would get out and do more than drink and try to get laid. See the tourist attractions. Learn some Korean. Meet some regular Korean people. You can get drunk and laid anywhere. For the vast majority of exapts, you aren't going to be in Korea long. Try to see something worthwhile.)

I ask the two questions about how the Korean legal system works and how the US system works, because --- when I hear people talking on this subject, they act like a GI is the Pope --- as if every infraction is earth shaking and as if the real horrible crimes, like murder, are unforgivable for the entire US military and for each new generation of soldier that rotates into Korea.

Look......I got really pissed off each time one of those major crimes came up. Soldiers should have more respect for their organization and their country and be ambassadors for it. I also knew I was going to have to go into class after class and hear again and again what a bunch of criminal bleeping people GIs were and it was only going to further solidify the factually wrong claims in Korean society that GIs "never" face Korean justice.

But, no matter how pissed off such a major crime made me, I could still keep my head on straight and pay attention --- knowing the GI was going to be found guilty in a Korean court and go to prison.

And not every crime by a soldier is equal to the anger a murder should generate.

Look at common street or bar fights in the US. Do they always result in the police locking people up and people going to jail?

No. I know this from experience with the police. The US system prefers warrants and judges making the decision on arrests. Usually when the police arrive, one party has already left the scene. Even if both are still there, the fight usually stops before the police arrive.

If the police do see people beating on each other, the chance of one or more arrests increases greatly.

The main thing in all these cases is the police try to determine who is the primary aggressor.

That can be the person who started the fight. Or, the person who did the most damage. You have a right to defend yourself, but you don't have a right to kick someone's butt up and down the street once their ability to harm you has been negated.

Usually, what the police get is a he said / he said situation with both sides pointing a finger at the other person. If you have witnesses, they are often the relative or best buddy of one of the guys and might have joined in the fight too.

What happens most of the time, unless someone is clearly in the wrong, is the police will tell both parties a report is going to be written, and either party can pick up a copy of it and talk to a violent crimes detective - or just go straight to the court house and talk to a judge --- with the end goal being to have an arrest warrant sworn for the other party. Then, a court will decide guilt. ---- which is how the US system wants it.

The police can, if the two parties are still acting like asses, arrest them both and let the prosecution decide who to prosecute or let both of them go if they both decide they don't want to press charges - which happens a lot.

Everyone involved in a street altercation doesn't get hung or even go to jail or even arrested at the scene in the US.

Why do we expect every GI should?

Every Korean surely doesn't. I don't know exactly how the Korean justice system usually handles a common street or bar altercation.

I know I have seen drunk patrol police --- meaning the police whose job it is to cruise entertainment areas to police up the drunks -- get slapped in the face by a Korean, and nobody was arrested. Having watched COPs for years and having some firsthand experience in law enforcement, that boggled me mind!!

But....that is how Koreans handle things. If you watch the Korean news, you will see surveillance footage like this --- where non-20 something year old Korean men and women are at the local police station or mini-drunk station, perhaps trying to get a friend who was taken into custody let loose, and they not only rant and rave at the police, they'll make bodily contact too, and the police just try to calm everybody down ------ and take a heck of a lot more abuse than you'd ever see even Andy Griffith in Mayberry take in the US.........but, again, you shouldn't expect Korea to be like the US.

So, all I ask is to keep things like this in mind when you run across the common widom in Korea about GI Crimes.

Are GIs more prone to criminal acts than Koreans? Do they get away with murder - literally?

How do you know?

....

I have been amazed over the years how the young KNPs that stand in front of US bases in Korea are treated. I actually had to protect one KNP from a taxi cab driver who hitting him because he wouldn't arrest a GI who would not pay him because the cab driver did not run the meter and tried to demand an outrageous wage and the soldier only payed him what he thought the ride was worth. So the taxi driver makes the biggest scene possible and assaulted the two KNPs in front of the gate.

I proceeded to go to his cab and write down his company and personal info which he then demanded to know what I was doing. I told him I was going to contact his company and lodge a complaint against him. He became really pissed off then but he finally left.

Then the fact that the KNPs are regularly assaulted by the protesters that periodically attack US bases and nothing happens to the protesters beating and even seriously injuring the police with bamboo sticks and rocks is something else that gets under my skin. Here are these young men doing their mandatory service and some of them are getting maimed by their fellow countrymen for simply doing their jobs. What is really sad about this is that no one cares.

There was an example of this culture clash in the 2002 orgy of hate that made it to the US too.

The bearded activist who always wears traditional garb and is half bald led a group to the US. They went to NY first and held some press conferences, but it got no play in the US, and the groups back home were grabbing all the headlines in Korea too. The group then went to DC as scheduled, and for a couple of days, they protested in front of the White House, like so many others have before, with no problem. But, the group still got no press coverage in the US or much at all in Korea, even though the Korean news was filled with stuff about anti-US protests that were massive at the time.

So, on the last day they were in DC before flying to LA, the leader decided to stop being like an American and do like he does in Korea --- like his famous screaming while tensing his neck and shoulder muscles until his head and arms shake uncontrolably.

At the protest at the White House this day, he decides to lead the group in the Korean ritual of pushing through the police line as if trying to get passed the gate. The US police held the line some but also let him approach. So, once he got to the gate, and nothing was going on, he decided to grab a hold of it and start shaking it, demanding to be let in to personally hand Bush a letter of protest, and pulled on the gate as if he might try to scale it, and the police and seurity people were not amused and finally took him under control.

As this was going on, one of the female protesters, as others in the group were also pulling and pushing on the police line somewhat like they do ritually in Korea but on a smaller scale there in DC, decided to slap one of the DC cops in the face.

That was a mistake.

She was taken to the ground, handcuffed, and I believe had her ankles hogtied, and was taken to jail.

Of course, this was all on film and played for the Korean people back home on the news --- which was the whole point for the confrontation in the first place.

And it was either a famous actor or a news anchor directly, I think, who said on the news after the scen was played, that he never really understood how low America thinks of Korea until he saw that happen.....

And it wasn't all BS.......I mean a false stance or lie to be indignant about....

In Korean society, where you can see drunks or other Koreans pushing and pulling on regular police or even slapping them, as well as getting into ritualistic beatings with the riot police as a national sport, the idea that two or three policemen would take a poor woman to the ground for just slapping a policeman in the face seems too much.

Whereas if you grow up in American society, you know that the sitution is one in which if someone looks like they are going to get out of control, become a physical danger to the cop or others on the scene, the threat is quickly neutralized by taking the person to the ground and putting them in handcuffs. On a good scene, if the police think someone might go hinky on them, they'll ask if they can put the person in handcuffs so no physical force will come into play, and a good percentage of the time, the person will say yes and allowed himself to be handcuffed, and when everyone calms down and things are wrapped up, if nobody is going to get arrested, the person is unhandcuffed and let go.

It is just a very different thing between Korea and the US on this in general.

And as for the poor Korean woman who went to jail for a day or so for slapping a cop, don't cry for her too much because she was a Korean and might have been influenced by how things work there.

She was a Korean-American school teacher from New York and should have darn well known better.....

I'll confirm that the subject is well covered by US in Korea and by GI Korea. Accurate as far as my experience has been. Two different cultures, with different ways of handling similar situations. There were murder trials and rape trials involving foreigners back in the early sixties. Some were imprisoned for long periods. I can't say regarding
"Convictions"... many were held by the US, then spirited to the US to be tried there, as it was widely believed by the military that justice would be better served. Korean Newspapers in those days were not free press. They were not allowed to write without government approval. They could not criticize the Korean President. Judges could be paid off, and I know for sure that system was flawed. Is the judicial system more honest now? Don't know. I hope so. Are the newspapers more free to print things criticizing the government? You bet. Will they print things criticizing our government? You bet. Do they check out every story for accuracy? No! Are they similar to all newspapers which will exaggerate headlines to sell more papers? You bet.

Here are some of the tid bits I was able to find in the (US) press archives concerning crimes by GIs in Korea in the 1960s and 70s.

I can't speak for what I couldn't find. I assume there were examples of criminials who got away with it. But, when I did this looking around this summer, I took it for granted the US probably didn't have a SOFA agreement giving Korea jurisdiction in crimes until the 1980s - given the nature of the Korean government before then - authoritarian and corrupt - and given how much I had heard from Koreans in person and in the news in the 1990s when GI crimes were reported. I also knew, as noted above, the Korean government heavily censored the press and was generally very pro-SK-US alliance and didn't have a hard time beliving it would cover up GI crimes.

This is what I found so far.

1st 2 GIs convicted under a SOFA signed that year for rape. 22 Dec 1967

1st civilian USFK worker convicted for being a complete jackass and firing his pistol in the street and injuring people in a drunken rage. 9 Feb 1968

This article says that 6 cases had come to trial since the SOFA was signed the year before. 4 verdicts had been reached at the time. 1 for selling diamond rings on the black market, 2 for the rape noted above, 1 for arson and assault (of a taxi driver), 1 for accident cause of death after throwing a chunk of wood from the back of a vehicle. The article also mentions a murder whose trial had just gotten underway.

1st two GIs sentenced to death for robbing and killing a Korean couple - most likely having the sentenced reduced on appeal, because I think I would have heard if Korea had executed any servicemen, but who knows? 5 Dec 1970

A 1977 murder with article written before the trial but notes such cases are supposed to be handled by the Korean court.

This is a image of a list of articles I found for the Washington Post I put off sending in for interlibrary loans and then forgot about. It covers articles I found about crimes between 1967-1979.

Now, this is just the US press, and unless they paid a heck of a lot more attention to South Korea than they have since the 1990s, you have to figure there were other soldiers who were tried and convicted that didn't get reported by them, especially considering the one article mentions the Korean courts handled a black market case --- which isn't exactly a murder or rape or shooting a firearm off in a crowded street.

And as I said before, I am more than willing to believe there were crimes where GIs were taken out of the country and tried by US military courts or even got away with it without being charged.

I was just suprised, even after being jaded by what my students couldn't tell me to back up their claims of "no" GIs "ever" having stood trial in Korean court, when I did this check and found cases as far back as 1967.

I would have bet money I would not have found one that far back, and I don't like to lose money.

2 other articles I found of interest are these two here (1962) and here (1964).

One is about two shootings of Koreans who refused to stop when challenged by sentries on the perimeter of a US camp. 1 shooting was on the Imjin up at the DMZ. In looking through the archives, a lot of the articles on South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s were ones with headlines like "3 GIs wounded in shoot out at DMZ" "4 NK commandos killed near US base near Sea of Japan." Between the end of the Korean war and sometime in the 1990s, I think it was 1,500 US soldiers had been killed in such clashes. They appeared to have been very common in the 1960s and 70s.

But, in reaction to these shootings, the Korean government ---- the one under the dictators that controlled the press and badly wanted the US alliance, was to express great public outrage at what they described as senselss murder by the GIs and demanded a SOFA be written to include such incidents.

In one of the articles, the National Assembly voted 100% for such a SOFA after such an event.

If I had the Korean language skills to do the kind of sifting needed to go through news archives, I'd love to see what I could find.....

I have used the English language archives available for the big Korean English press, and I found cases of assault tried as far back as 1988 where the archives stopped.

Sounds like you accomplished proving that it certainly wasn't the "first time" as the students thought! No use beating a dead horse. I could tell stories about why a 6X6 Truck driver was sent to the US after his truck hit a house and ran over some chickens. In those days, such a driver would go to court and besides other damages, would be held liable for the price of the chickens, and if they were hens, for the price of the number of eggs the hen would have laid during the remainder of her lifetime. Then there was a certain officer, authorized to bear arms, who shot a Korean in the back, fleeing from an attempted break in of his off post home. He was
shipped out the next day, supposedly to obtain justice in the US. I knew him personally. I never heard from him again. But I believe the Korean Trumvirate would have put him away for a few years, in a prison unfit for human habitation. So the Sofa came about. Generally a good thing. Life goes on.

Those are the kinds of stories and info I'm looking for...

...and that is exactly the kind of think I am just asking other people who run across the common theme of GI crimes in Korea to ask to learn about.

It was simply asking for my Korean students to educate me when I first arrived in Korea that I started to see how full of BS is the common wisdom in Korea on GI Crimes.

When person after person had such strong beliefs about GIs getting away with, like one long time student told me and later many other Koreans said was "about right", 15 Korean women are raped and killed each year by GIs, but Korean society can do nothing about it ----- but they can give me no specifics whatsoever about 1 or 2 real cases, instead saying stuff like, "I read it somewhere" if I happened to ask simple questions beyond their statements......I started to see maybe there was much more to this story that I needed to find out about.

And when more than 1 real, well publicized murder or street assault did occur, and the Korean justice system did handle the case, and students would still say the next time one happened that it was "the first time" a GI had ever faced Korean justice, and in between, even students who had been in my class the last time a GI was put in Korean prison, they would fall back to the idea that it "never" happens, eventually big red flashing warning lights would go off.

And the more I've dug, I still haven't come close to sympathising with that common wisdom.

I had general sympathy with it when I first came to Korea, because I didn't know any better.

But, by just asking simple questions, it only took about 3 to 6 months before I knew something was clearly wrong.

GI,

I feel for the police that guard the military installations. I can also feel their hatred toward the US service members. In a way, I can understand it. They stand in front of the bases for long hours and sleep in buses.

I try to say hi to them all the time, but they simply ignore me. So, I simply walk past them now.

This is a good topic. I was doing research on Korean crime in the U.S. a few months back. There are several Korean mafias in the US that ship Korean women to the US as sex slaves. They also commit tons of violent crimes. I found several articles on this. My point is that Koreans commit crimes in the U.S and I would bet a ton of money, even more so than GIs in Korea. I think our military does pretty well concerning there have been roughly 32,000+ GIs in Korea on average. How many 32,000+ villages can show low crime stats?

Most GI crime in Korea is curfew violations, alcohol instances (late for work, etc) and sexual assaults on other military members. This is not a guess, but a fact as I have been to enough briefings in my one year in Korea. Also, all of the Article 15 and other court martial hearings are put into the base paper.

About a month ago, a Korean taxi hit an American boy and broke his leg. I know this for a fact because I know the father and he told me. When a GI gets into a simple accident it is printed in the Korean press (I can think of at lest 6 this year). When a Korean rapes an American officer (happened in Taegu about 8 months ago) or hits an American boy with a taxi, you can be sure of complete silence in the Korean media. Mr. Joe is correct when he says it is all about selling papers. This is also why no good news ever makes it out of Iraq.

Mike

__________________
Visit USFK Classifieds, the FREE classifieds in Korea!