Police Integrity in Thailand

Abstract

The Royal Thai Police, a police agency decentralized by law, yet centralized in reality, is under the umbrella of the office of the prime minister. This chapter explores the forms of police integrity among the Thai police officers. The representative stratified sample of 280 police officers, collected in 2013, evaluated hypothetical scenarios describing various forms of police misconduct. Results suggest that police officers evaluated the behaviors described in the scenarios to vary in their seriousness. Only one scenario-an opportunistic theft-was evaluated as very serious and, at the same time, was recognized by the overwhelming majority as rule violating. The respondents thought that most of the described behaviors deserve a milder form of discipline. At the same time, they also expected relatively mild discipline for most of the scenarios. They thought that dismissal was the appropriate and expected discipline only for the opportunistic theft. We also detected the code of silence and concluded that it is not a flat prohibition of reporting. The more serious the respondents perceived the scenarios, the less likely they were to cover it by the code. Finally, the police officers expected that other officers in their agencies would be much more likely to protect all these behaviors in silence than they themselves would.

A multi-country comparative study of the perceived police disciplinary environments

“…In particular, a recent comparative study by Kutnjak Ivković and Haberfeld (2015, p. 355) reveals that most of the surveyed police officers expected dismissalthe harshest disciplinein only five of ten countries (Kutnjak Ivković and Haberfeld, 2015, p. 355). Unlike Australia (Porter et al, 2015), Croatia (Kutnjak Ivković, 2015b), Estonia (Vallmuur, 2015), Slovenia (Lobnikar and Meško, 2015), and the USA , where the expected outcome is dismissal, the majority of the police officers surveyed in Armenia expected milder discipline (Khechumyan and Kutnjak Ivković, 2015), some combination of written warning, salary decrease, and suspension in South Korea (Kang and Kutnjak Ivković, 2015), verbal reprimand in Thailand (Phetthong and Kutnjak Ivković, 2015), and no discipline at all in Russia (Cheloukhine et al, 2015). Despite the lack of an empirical study directly assessing the relation between the likelihood of perceived dismissal in a country and the country's standing on the PCI, a reader may conjuncture a pattern.…”