BANGKOK — Bangkok governor MR Sukhumbhand Paribatra found himself at the center of yet another corruption controversy this week when it was revealed that as many as 40% of the capital city’s police force were in fact fake.
The bogus police officers were discovered in an undercover investigation by newspaper Matichon, whose journalists secretly filmed interactions with police officers at road checkpoints and on the street. Their investigations revealed that a large percentage of Bangkok’s Metropolitan Police were actually just regular men who had no actual law-enforcement training or even awareness of the what the city laws were.
Further investigation revealed that as many as four out of every 10 new police officers commissioned to work in the capital had in fact been hired directly from the general population and given a uniform, with instructions on how to collect bribes and return a certain percentage of those bribes back to their supervisors.
The governor, already facing possible censure by the governing Pheu Thai party for using hundreds of dummy surveillance cameras throughout the city, defended the use of dummy police as “effective and economical.”
“The training of a real police officer is expensive and time-consuming,” he explained at a press conference. “With recent budget cuts, it became necessary to find creative ways to maintain a strong law-enforcement presence while not running the department into deficit.”
Sukhumband cited positive urban crime statistics as proof that dummy police officers acted as a deterrent against crime. Additionally, he stressed that only real police officers were used in actual investigations of major crimes such as murder and robbery.
“When Bangkok’s citizens truly need an actual cop, we provide one,” he said.
However, Deputy OAG secretary-general Phisit Leelachirophas announced that there would be a full investigation into the dummy police operations to see if there was any corruption involved in the procurement of the fake police.
“We will check the budget records carefully to make sure that no laws were broken,” he said. “We will also look into the system of bribe collection and kickbacks to make sure that everything was done transparently.”
