Everyone in Thailand knows that the police are corrupt. We all know that they are constantly seeking ways of fleecing the public of money and that this is the only reason why anyone would really pursue this career path since it doesn't actually pay that well. In fact, I have been told that the officers have to procure their own uniforms and even their guns with their own money. Often you will see police officers riding around on their own scooters that are not official in any capacity. The police force clearly either doesn't have any money or that money is being "re-routed" into people's pockets.
One of the best jobs that a person can have in Thailand is to be a chief of police in really any area because all of the money that is taken off of people in bribes flows upstream to the big boss.
Recently, a story of a police chief that is known as "Joe Ferrari" went more than a little too far with his extortion attempts.
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It is also very well known that if you pay the police, you can get out of almost anything even killing another cop. Just look at the Red Bull heir story, that guys is still walking free despite the fact that everyone knows that he drink-drive killed a cop by crashing into him and then fleeing the scene of the crime. That guy is still free and I can't even imagine the amount of bribes they have been paying in order to make this happen.
Some offenders though, such as the person that you can not see in the image above because he is on the ground with a bag on his head, don't want to give up the money to be released. I don't know a great deal about the situation, but apparently the person in custody was a high-end drug dealer and rather than bust him, the police in question were trying to extort 2 million baht out of him - which is around $50,000. I don't know if the guy didn't have the money, felt as though he was untouchable, or if he was just sick of the police officers in question but in order to try to coerce him further, the officers in question, including the chief of police, roughed him up and accidentally killed him.
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I don't know how the video leaked but it did and had it not I am sure the police would have simply made up some "suicide" situation like we do in the USA from time to time. Public outrage ensued, and several of the police officers involved turned themselves in. Ferrari Joe on the other hand, decided to go on the run. He was caught just a few days later in Myanmar, a country that he is not supposed to be entering anyway at the moment but it is just another example of "rules for thee not for me" that the elite have.
This case has gone viral, so so I am curious as to how the authorities are going to try to sweep this one under the rug. I suppose they could just do the same thing they do whenever the Prime Minister is getting in some trouble and just make Covid a really big deal again. That seems to work all over the world.
The problem here is that they are going to be looking at the fact that he killed a guy, and they should. But the bigger part of the problem is that this sort of stuff goes on in police precincts all over Thailand and everybody knows it yet nobody does anything about it. I recall a story a friend of mine told me the other day about how an anti-corruption task force was established and it took less than a month before this task force was caught taking bribes.
When a police officer, even a police chief ends up being known as "Ferrari Joe" because of his massive luxury car collection that is well beyond his pay scale, I think it is relatively obvious that something dirty is going on. I looked it up and his salary is $43,000 per year and he has 29 cars. Nah, nothing suspicious about that at all!