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.
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Notes
- 1.
The NCPO includes the secretary of defense as a new committee which allow the army general to have control over the appointment of the chief of police.
- 2.
There is no “she” because a person eligible to be appointed the chief of police must hold the rank of police general. To date, the highest rank obtained by female police officers has been police lieutenant general.
- 3.
This does not include other bureaus that do not have a patrol function, such as the Police Education Bureau, Police Cadet Academy, Bureaus under Command, and General Staff.
- 4.
NACC’s black color case no. 50440327 and 51442126 retrieved from http://www.nacc.go.th/culpability.php.
- 5.
kin tām nām is a Thai slang which means take the usual/rake-off/payoff even though the payoff came from the bribery money.
- 6.
Following the rule of thumb established in prior work (Klockars et al. 2006, p. 26), we consider only the differences of 0.50 or larger to be meaningful.
- 7.
Answers by the respondents who selected either 4 or 5 on the scale were grouped together.
- 8.
The chi-square test of independence was statistically significant in all 11 scenarios, suggesting that the null hypothesis that these two variables are statistically independent should be rejected. Both the chi-square test and the Phi coefficient suggest that the views of appropriate and expected discipline were related.
- 9.
Following the rule of thumb established in prior work (Klockars et al. 2006, p. 26), we consider only the differences of 0.50 or larger to be meaningful.
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Phetthong, N., Kutnjak Ivković, S. (2015). Police Integrity in Thailand. In: Kutnjak Ivković, S., Haberfeld, M. (eds) Measuring Police Integrity Across the World. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2279-6_10
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