Woman Shows Vietnam Police Apartment Check—’If You Lived in America, You Know How Scary This Could Be’

A woman’s video about an encounter with police in Vietnam is going viral online. She says police conduct random apartment checks to verify who lives there and make sure residents have the proper documentation. According to her, officers can show up without notice to conduct the checks.

In her clip shared to social media, which has since been reshared by X user @nikkithagod, the woman shows how the search plays out because she apparently recorded it.

Woman Says Police Apartment Checks Are Routine in Vietnam

In the clip, the woman begins with the police showing up at her door and telling viewers, “So the police did come to my apartment today.” She then explains that “This is a pretty standardized search, if you will. They come to the apartment, they take a picture of everyone who lives in the apartment,” she explains.

With the police walking around her apartment in the video, she then calmly explains that they “do a mini search to make sure I’m the only one living in the apartment.” If someone else were living there, she says officers would make sure that person was properly documented as living there.

She says that during this mini search, the officers ask for her information, so she provided them with her passport and visa. She says they then go over all her paperwork to make sure “everything was correct.”

In her video, the officers seem calm and friendly, unlike some police searches caught on camera in the United States, which is what she sort of said when she ended her clip with, “If you lived in America then you know just how scary this could be.”

While the woman called the search standardized and didn’t seem to think of it as a big deal, people in the comments weren’t on the same page. “She’s delusional if she thinks that’s a standard practice,” one person wrote. Another suggested that “She wants to give them a pass so badly,” crediting it to her having “‘better someplace else” syndrome”.

Another also suggested that her interaction was actually scarier than some of the police interactions in America, writing, “Genuinely sounds infinitely scarier than 90% of police interactions here. You’re on a different planet essentially with nowhere near the same amount of freedom.”

Others, however, questioned if this is in fact how Vietnam practices work, and one person entered the comments suggesting they live there and, yes, that’s how things are done. “I live in Vietnam. This is standard. In fact, they have laws right now where even if you visit someone’s house or apartment and stay the night, you are supposed to let the local police station know.”

The Daily Dot was unable to independently verify the woman’s account of the police encounter or confirm whether random apartment checks are standard practice in Vietnam. The claims in this article are based on the woman’s video and comments from users who responded to the post.