Royal Thai Police - Police Conduct

Police Conduct

Recently, Thai Police and justice system in the holiday island of Phuket have been accused of corruption, and over-reaction by tourist to the island. In one case an Australian woman was arrested and accused of stealing a bar mat. She spent four nights in jail and had her passport confiscated. Then she faced a wait of another 14 weeks on bail until the next phase of her prosecution. This is despite a friend of her confessing to the police and providing a sworn statement that she had placed the bar mat in the woman's bag as a joke. Eventually the case was resolved after the intervention of governor of Phuket, Wichai Praisa-nob, after being contacted by Thailand's Ministry of Tourism and the Foreign Ministry. A deal was done under which she would plead guilty, she would be fined, and governor Wichai Praisa-nob would pay the fine and give an apology. After this her passport was returned and she was allowed to return to Australia.

In another case an American couple were arrested upon returning to Thailand and accused of being responsible of burning down a house in which they resided on a previous stay at Phuket. The fire had previously been investigated and found to have been caused by an electrical fault. To recover their passports and being allowed to depart Thailand they had to compensate the house owner and make under the table payments to the judges, the public prosecutor, everyone down to the bailiffs in the court. This cost them around 45,000 US dollars.

In 2007 a 15 year old Danish boy was involved in an insurance fraud when a Chinese couple threw themselves under his Jetboat killing one of them. While the court ruled the incident as an accident, the police detained the boy and held his passport until an amount of 300,000 DKK had been paid so the case could be settled within weeks.

The conduct of the local police in Pai, and Thai drug enforcement, has also generated an unusual amount of controversy over the past decade. This is partially due to the proximity of Pai to drug routes from the Shan State in Burma, however given the post-2000 rise in incidents involving foreign tourists, it is evident that other factors are also at work.

Police corruption remains a problem in Thailand. Transparency International's Global Corruption Barometer 2007, a survey assessing the public's perceptions and experience of corruption in 60 countries, states that, for Thailand, the police received a rating of four out of five, where one represents "not at all corrupt" and five represents "extremely corrupt" (6 December 2007, 22).