With frequent headlines alleging police wrongdoing ranging from corruption to kidnaping and murder, they hardly needed the reminder from Gen. Pochana Boonyachinda. Graft in the force is longstanding and no secret. Illicit night life and gambling dens are notorious sources of protection money paid monthly to local police precincts.
But recently Thais have been shocked by the scale, brazenness, viciousness--and apparent institutionalization--of police crime and corruption. Long the recipients of protection money and sexual favors from brothels, police officers act as enforcers and even procurers in a business that amounts to a modern-day slave trade. On the day in that Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai announced a crackdown on child and forced prostitution, the body of a young prostitute who tried to escape a brothel was found with her throat slashed at the provincial hall of southern Songkhla province.
Two policemen were among six suspects charged with her murder. Last year, much skepticism was expressed about a police report that said another escaped prostitute somehow managed to poison herself during a police interrogation. The New York-based organization Human Rights Watch charged a year ago that Thai police are involved in the procurement and trafficking of Burmese girls for Thai brothels. The brothel agents are well supplied with money to pay them off. Police also have been accused of conspiring with Japanese gangsters to send women to Japan to work in the sex trade there.
Meanwhile, seven police officers are on trial in the slayings of 13 businessmen and tourists from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. Arrested a year ago, they allegedly preyed on Chinese-looking foreigners, taking them away on the pretext that their travel documents were not in order. The victims were driven to a deserted area outside Bangkok, robbed, beaten and shot.
Their corpses were run over or otherwise mutilated in an effort to thwart identification. The murders were a deadly twist on a common extortion scheme in which officers or their confederates plant drugs on hapless tourists and then put on the squeeze for bribes to avoid charges. The other half they proudly displayed to journalists in claiming credit for solving the crime. Five lower-ranking police officers were among the 11 people arrested in connection with the heist itself, which took place across the border in Laos.
