Hate the police.

Apparently, there has been a recent crackdown in drug use and trafficking in Korea recently. Since I don’t go to clubs, work at a public school, or even really party in any sense, I missed it. Hell, I don’t hang out with many foreigners at all. Anyway, I met some foreign teachers last night in my neighborhood and we had some donuts and coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, and I got into an argument.

One guy insists that his friend was interrogated and jailed for a week because his cell phone number was in the phone of a friend of a friend of someone who was selling marijuana in Seoul.

I called bullshit, and he went apeshit. “Dude, they don’t have a bill of rights here or any of that shit.”

The specific claim: In Korea, you can be interrogated and potentially jailed without charges for one week for third-degree association with someone arrested on drug charges. This was apparently claimed by a cop in an interrogation room.

Now that I have a calculator and some free time I plan to demonstrate just how fucking retarded this claim is.
This guy claimed that cops investigate drug arrests “to the third degree.”
That is, investigating every person who is in the phone record of every person who talked on the phone with a suspect, and everyone in their phone record, as well.
Let’s take the simplest example.
One person gets arrested. The cops start looking into his friends. This is assuming ONE person gets busted, mind you.

Let’s say I have 45 numbers in my phone record for the last couple months – that’s business, personal, medical, solicitation, ordering food, etc. That is 45 *phone numbers* they need to investigate, find out if it’s a business, a private party, their address, if it was to a business, who made/received the call, and so on.
Now, let’s say that each of those numbers has another 45 contacts.
45*45=2025
So, at 2 degrees, we have 2,025 *numbers* to investigate. That is 6 thousand phone calls to just identify who is who and where to find them, assuming (optimistically) that you find everything you need in 3 phone calls.
Now, let’s take that another degree.
2,025*45=91,125
So again, figure 3 phone calls per contact to identify and locate each party.
91,125*3=273,375 phone calls.
Figure those phone calls averages 5 minutes.

273,375*5=1,366,875 minutes

1366875/60= 22,781.25 hours investigating further leads after one arrest. Then, figure the price of those hours, plus benefits, for the staff doing the investigation. 200 hours a month if it’s a very dedicated cop, so that’s
22,781.25/200=113.91 cops very busy for one month investigating nothing except one drug arrest. Then, remember that none of those 91,125 people have even been interrogated in person, much less incarcerated, and you haven’t even done anything with that first guy you arrested.
Seriously people.

People who believe anything a cop says are stupid.