Crime
In recent years, Pattaya has served as a hideaway for foreigners with connections to organized crime in their home countries, and dozens have been murdered in gang-related disputes.
According to Pattaya police, it is common that foreign tourists get drugged and robbed by prostitutes in their hotel rooms. Visitors may encounter petty crime, usually limited to pickpocketing and confidence tricks, particularly in and around major tourist areas such as Jomtien and Pattaya Beaches and on the "baht buses". A special Tourist Police division has been established to aid foreign tourists who are victims of crime. The 2009 British eight-episode TV documentary Big Trouble in Tourist Thailand described crimes involving tourists in Pattaya.
On April 11, 2009, Thailand's Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva declared a state of emergency in the areas of Pattaya and Chonburi, in response to red shirt anti-government protestors breaking into the conference center of the Royal Cliff Beach Resort hotel complex, the then-venue of an ASEAN meeting. The meeting was immediately canceled and Asian leaders were evacuated, some by helicopter.
Read more about this topic: Pattaya
Famous quotes containing the word crime:
“Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)
“[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)