Did a female police officer get a special promotion just for giving her uniform to a hiker? No, that's not true: She actually rescued the hiker in distress after looking for hours on mountain trails, where she eventually found her with hypothermia.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published by the account @jeongmisae on TikTok on May 13, 2023, under the title "여경이 활약한 이유ㄷㄷ" translated from Korean into English by Lead Stories staff as "Why the female police officer did so well."
It opened:
In Iksan, a female police officer got a special promotion just because she lent her uniform to cover a hiker's body.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu May 18 01:47:00 2023 UTC)
The video cited a news article to support the claim but deliberately left out an important detail.
Female police officer Song Yoon-Ah actually took off her uniform and used it to warm up a hiker in distress, but she did more than that to deserve her promotion. She looked for hours on different mountain trails for the woman, who had gotten lost while hiking early in the morning and managed to rescue her, in very rigid weather conditions: the hiker was in hypothermia and had almost frozen to death by the time she was found by Song.
According to a local news report, at 5:20 am on December 12, 2012, the Iksan police received an anonymous call, alerting that someone was crying for help near the top of Baesan Mountain in Mohyeon-dong, in Iksan. Song was one of the police officers who went on the rescue mission. After a long search on different trails, she finally found a female hiker on a cliff near the peak. The woman had fallen and was injured. Song then took her uniform off and put it on the woman's body, trying to warm her up. The hiker was in the early stages of hypothermia since the temperature was -10 degrees Celsius. She was then taken to the hospital and made a full recovery.
Officer Song was promoted for her dedication to public service: she contributed to creating and distributing GPS maps of areas of concern for possible sexual crimes, another relevant element that also led to her promotion.
