What was claimed
A video shows UK police arresting an eight-year-old old boy and his friend for waving the English flag in public.
Our verdict
This isn’t what the video shows. It is actually an edited clip from a 2008 episode of the TV programme Traffic Cops in which two children are arrested on suspicion of theft from a motor vehicle.
A video has been circulating on social media with false claims that it depicts two boys being arrested for “waving the English flag in public”.
The footage has been shared on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and TikTok, where it has been viewed over 183,000 times.
It shows police officers putting two boys in handcuffs, one of whom says “I’ve just come out my nana’s”, and then being booked in at a police station. One police officer says “they’ve been identified as being responsible in that incident” although in this video it is not clear what the boys are being arrested for.
Overlaid text on the video says: “Boy Arrested For Protesting in the Streets with England Flag.”
But this is misleading. The footage has nothing to do with recent protests in the UK involving England and Union Jack flags or the social media campaign to display these flags in public spaces—dubbed Operation Raise the Colours.
It is actually a clip from an old episode of the TV documentary series Traffic Cops.
The full episode is available on YouTube, where it is clear that the boys—whose faces are blurred—are being arrested on suspicion of theft from a motor vehicle, and not for anything to do with protests or waving flags.
The section where the police officer states this has been edited out of the video circulating currently online.
At the end of the episode, it’s stated that the 15-year-old who stole a package containing women’s boots was ordered to pay £100 in compensation and that a second boy admitted committing several other offences and was sent to a young offender’s institute for six months
The caption on the YouTube video says the episode was aired in June 2008.
We have fact checked a number of misleading posts online about England and Union Jack flags in recent weeks, as well as fact checking claims about the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march.
Before sharing content like this that you see on social media, first consider whether it really shows what it claims to, and whether it comes from a verifiable and trustworthy source. Our Full Fact guides and toolkit can help you do this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the clip has been edited and is actually footage from an old episode of the TV programme Traffic Cops.
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