One of the most common responses to the investigative findings surrounding Burning Sun is remarkably simple:

“The police are corrupt.”

When it is pointed out that police investigated allegations of systematic drugging, sexual assault and trafficking at Burning Sun without substantiating many of the most extreme claims, the response is frequently that the investigation cannot be trusted. Police were corrupt. Police were paid off. Wealthy businessmen had connections. Therefore, whatever investigators concluded can be disregarded.

There is an obvious problem with this reasoning.

Police corruption absolutely existed within the broader Burning Sun scandal. Officers were investigated for inappropriate relationships with individuals connected to the case, and the National Police Agency ultimately identified ten incumbent officers in connection with suspected collusion or misconduct during its broader investigation.

Acknowledging this, however, does not establish that police concealed a sex trafficking operation.

These are two separate claims requiring two separate sets of evidence.

Corruption Is Not Evidence Of Every Possible Cover-Up

The existence of corruption within a police department does not automatically prove every accusation that department fails to substantiate.

If a police department has previously accepted bribes, this may provide reasonable grounds for increased scrutiny of its investigations. It does not mean that every crime alleged within its jurisdiction must have occurred.

Yet this distinction frequently disappears when discussing Burning Sun.

If investigators had uncovered evidence demonstrating that Burning Sun employees systematically drugged women and delivered them to VIP customers, that would reasonably be considered evidence supporting the trafficking narrative.

Instead, when investigators failed to substantiate those allegations, the absence of evidence itself became evidence.

The police didn’t find it because they were corrupt.

The police didn’t prosecute anyone for it because they were corrupt.

The police publicly stated that certain allegations could not be confirmed because they were corrupt.

This creates an argument that cannot possibly be disproven.

Evidence supporting the trafficking narrative proves trafficking occurred. Evidence contradicting the trafficking narrative proves there was a cover-up. The absence of evidence proves the cover-up was successful.

At that point, the argument has ceased functioning as skepticism and entered the territory of conspiracy theory.

Burning Sun Was Actually Investigated

The idea that allegations against Burning Sun simply disappeared due to police corruption also misrepresents the scale of the investigation.

In July 2019, National Police Commissioner Min Gapryong publicly responded to a Blue House petition requesting further investigation into allegations involving Burning Sun’s VIP rooms. Police had investigated customers and employees associated with materials submitted as potential evidence and arrested dozens of people in connection with illegally filmed sexual material.

Min nevertheless stated that investigators had been unable to confirm the reported sexual assaults and drug administration associated with the VIP-room allegations.

This conclusion came after an investigation involving 152 investigators. Across the broader investigation, 354 people were apprehended and 29 were detained. Police officers themselves were among those investigated for misconduct.

This does not mean the investigation was perfect.

It does, however, create a problem for the idea that “the police were corrupt” adequately explains away its findings.

Hundreds of people were investigated. People were arrested for drug crimes. People were arrested for sexual crimes. Police officers were investigated. Club employees were investigated. Businesses were searched. Financial crimes were uncovered. Separate crimes involving Seungri, Jung Joonyoung, Choi Jonghoon and numerous other individuals eventually resulted in convictions.

The investigation was clearly capable of finding crimes.

The assumption that it mysteriously became incapable of doing so only when investigating the specific allegations that support the trafficking narrative requires considerably more evidence than is usually provided.

The Argument Becomes Uncomfortably Racialized

There is also another aspect of this argument that deserves considerably more scrutiny: the way South Korea itself is discussed.

Western discussions of Burning Sun frequently portray South Korea as so inherently corrupt that its police, prosecutors, courts and other institutions can essentially be disregarded altogether.

South Korea becomes less of a real country containing millions of people and numerous competing institutions and more of a vaguely dystopian Asian society where wealthy men possess unlimited power and the entire justice system operates according to their whims.

Police findings cannot be trusted because Korean police are corrupt.

Court findings cannot be trusted because the Korean justice system is corrupt.

Korean reporting contradicting the popular narrative cannot be trusted because Korean media is corrupt.

Any Korean source that complicates the established English-language narrative can therefore be dismissed before its evidence is even considered.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about this.

Criticizing corruption within South Korea is not inherently racist. South Korea has very real problems involving corruption, misogyny, sexual violence and abuses of institutional power. Those problems should be discussed.

Treating South Korea as uniquely and almost comically corrupt, however, is another matter entirely.

Police corruption exists in the United States. It exists in the United Kingdom. It exists throughout Europe.

Few reasonable people would accept “American police are corrupt” as sufficient evidence that an American nightclub secretly operated a massive sex trafficking organization despite an investigation failing to establish one.

Evidence would still be required.

Yet when the country involved is South Korea, the threshold frequently changes.

Suddenly, the assumption that police were bribed requires no documentation. The assumption that wealthy businessmen controlled the investigation requires no paper trail. The assumption that investigators deliberately concealed evidence requires no whistleblower, financial record, internal communication or testimony.

The fact that the country is perceived as corrupt becomes evidence enough.

Ironically, this argument often comes from people attempting to criticize misogyny within Korean society while simultaneously relying upon racialized stereotypes about that same society.

South Korea is transformed into a caricature: patriarchal, secretive, corrupt and fundamentally incapable of policing itself.

The “Police General” Does Not Prove A Trafficking Conspiracy

Senior Superintendent Yoon Gyugeun is frequently invoked as evidence that this corruption extended all the way into protecting Burning Sun.

Yoon—the infamous “police general” discussed in chats involving people within Seungri’s business circle—was accused of improperly obtaining information related to a police crackdown involving Monkey Museum and passing information to Yoo Inseok.

This certainly justified investigation.

What it does not establish is that Yoon was protecting a trafficking operation at Burning Sun.

Those claims are separated by an enormous evidentiary gap.

The existence of a police officer behaving improperly around individuals connected to Seungri demonstrates potential police misconduct. It does not retroactively prove every allegation made against every business associated with those individuals.

Once again, the existence of corruption is being used to fill an evidentiary hole rather than provide evidence.

Distrust Is Not Proof

There is nothing unreasonable about questioning the Burning Sun investigation.

There is nothing unreasonable about questioning Korean police.

There is not even anything unreasonable about wondering whether investigators missed crimes that occurred inside Burning Sun. No investigation can conclusively establish that a crime never occurred.

The problem begins when possibility becomes certainty.

“The investigation may have missed something” is reasonable skepticism.

“The police may have been influenced by corruption” is a hypothesis worth investigating.

“The police didn’t confirm the trafficking ring because they were paid off, therefore the trafficking ring definitely existed” is circular reasoning.

It begins with the assumption that trafficking occurred and constructs an explanation for every piece of evidence that fails to support that assumption.

This is especially important when discussing Burning Sun because the scandal accumulated an extraordinary number of allegations during its earliest months. Some were substantiated. Others were not. Over time, the distinction between the two has largely disappeared within English-language discussions.

Distrusting the police does not resolve that problem.

It simply provides another mechanism through which allegations can be transformed into facts without ever producing the evidence normally required to make that transformation.

There are legitimate criticisms to make about South Korean police. There are legitimate criticisms to make about how sexual violence is investigated and prosecuted in South Korea. There are legitimate reasons to scrutinize the Burning Sun investigation and the officers implicated in misconduct.

None of those criticisms require pretending that corruption is a magical force capable of proving allegations for which evidence cannot otherwise be found.

And when an argument ultimately requires dismissing the investigative institutions of an entire foreign country as inherently untrustworthy in order to preserve a predetermined conclusion, it may be worth examining exactly where skepticism ends—and prejudice begins.