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  • 2020-10-15 (xsd:date)
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  • The image has been doctored -- the original photo shows police protesting an unrelated issue in 2019 (en)
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  • An image of a policeman appearing to hold a placard with a slogan protesting baton charging on innocent people has been shared hundreds of times in multiple Facebook and Twitter posts. The claim is false; the image has been doctored -- the original photo shows the policeman calling for legal action against lawyers accused of assaulting police officers in November 2019. The image was published on Facebook here on October 9, 2020. Screenshot of misleading Facebook post The policeman in the photo appears to be holding a Hindi placard that reads in English: Baton charging the innocents, we won’t be able to do it so. The post’s Hindi caption translates as: The police do not baton charge, but the government makes them do so. Baton charging is a police practice used locally to confront crowds or protests. A recent example can be seen here in an October 2020 report by India Today about police baton charging protesters in the Indian state of West Bengal. The image was also shared alongside the same claim on Facebook here , here , here and here and on Twitter here , here , here and here . However, the claim is false. A reverse image search on Google found that the image has been doctored. The original photo was published here on the Indian English-language news website Scroll.in on November 5, 2019, and shows the policeman holding a placard that reads: WE WANT JUSTICE. The photo is attributed to the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency, and is captioned: Police personnel in Delhi Protest. Screenshot of original photo published in media report The other Hindi-language placards seen in the photo translate to English as: Who will listen, whom shall we speak to and Today is police, tomorrow who? The Scroll reports that a police officer in the Indian capital of Delhi joined thousands of police personnel to protest against an assault on his colleagues by lawyers outside the Delhi Police Headquarters on the weekend. The tensions had been building since November 2 after a dispute over a wrongly parked vehicle outside Tis Hazari Court Complex in Old Delhi snowballed into a clash that left 10 policemen and several lawyers injured, and 17 vehicles vandalised. Below is a screenshot comparison of the image in the misleading Facebook post (L) and the photo published by Scroll.in (R): Image comparing screenshot The PTI photo was also published in this report by the Indian English-language magazine India Today on November 5, 2019. Screenshot of original image published by India TV The protest was also reported by other local media, including English-language newspaper Economic Times here , and English-language newspaper The Hindu here . (en)
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