What was claimed
Two UK police forces used the same photo to illustrate two different crimes.
Our verdict
This is incorrect. The tweet from Cumbria Road Police is real, the image of a tweet from Police Scotland is fake.
Two police forces did not use the same photo to illustrate two different lockdown crimes
11 May 2020
A post on Facebook has claimed that two different British police forces used the same photo of a car to illustrate two different crimes.
This is incorrect.
The photo was originally posted by Cumbria Roads Police in reference to an incident they dealt with where a family were driving from London and reportedly stopped on their way to Motherwell, Scotland, for a three-day trip, breaking lockdown rules.
We couldn’t find any record of the tweet shown in the post from the Police Scotland Twitter account. The tweet also does not appear to match the style of information given on the Police Scotland account, whereas the Cumbria Roads Police account frequently tweets about incidents.
The timestamp shown on one version of the tweet does not match Twitter’s time and date style.
Cumbria Roads Police have stated on their Twitter that the tweet attributed to Scottish police is not real. We have reached out to Police Scotland for comment.
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 this image of a car was not used by two police forces.