In recent weeks there has been a lot of talk in Thailand about the need to reform the police. Everyone agrees that policing in Thailand is a huge problem. As is common throughout Asia, the police force is the main day-to-day perpetrator of killings, torture and other gross abuses of human rights there. It is thoroughly corrupt and serves as a handy tool of politicians and organised crime. All this has been officially recognised for some 30 years, since a series of commissions were established to recommend changes. In 1980 a parliamentary committee said bluntly that “the police department is hated and despised by all people outside of it”. But the police have over the decades successfully used their contacts in politics, the military and crime syndicates to withstand outside pressure and keep business as usual. So what to do now?
Much of the talk lately has been about decentralising police power. At present the police force is dominated by the centre. As policing does not require the same sort of top-down management as the military, more power can be vested locally. In other countries, police departments have been successfully organised and managed by provincial or district governments. Some suggest that Thailand should follow a similar model. One proposal has been to place the police under the control of local governors.
Thoughtful persons have quickly realised that the talk about decentralisation is meaningless. Decentralisation is a neat term that in itself means nothing and solves nothing. On the contrary, it can easily make matters far worse. Up to the end of the 19th century, policing in Thailand was in fact localised. Thugs operating under governors, who retained a percentage of everything that they collected from the public, operated in lieu of an official police agency. The formal police force was set up in order to rationalise the handling of law and order, reduce abuses by local authorities and obtain a larger share of the pie for Bangkok. But as the feudal model of local patronage today persists in Thailand underneath a modern veneer, handing power back to governors and other provincial authorities would be a boon for local politicians and mafia figures with which the police already have close connections.
So why do it? Because the talk about decentralising the police conveniently avoids the real questions: what is the actual purpose of police reform? For whose benefit will changes be made? What are the root problems that need to be addressed?
In the unquestioning climate prevailing across Thailand since the September 19 coup, it has been taken for granted that police reforms are being proposed in the public interest, to improve accountability, protect human rights and uphold the rule of law. But there is no evidence to suggest that the current government is interested in any of these things. On the contrary, what is of interest to the current government is its own interests. And as the government is under a military regime, these are the interests of the military: any reforms of the police proposed by the current government must be viewed through the lens of police-military relationships and the intentions of the army generals in control at this time for their police counterparts.
In their 1994 book “Corruption & democracy in Thailand”, Pasuk Phongpaichit and Sungsidh Piriyarangsan have written that
“From the start, the main function of the police had been to protect the state and extend its power. After the military assumed control of the government [in 1938], the security of the state became confused with the perpetuation of military-dominated government. The police came to be a part of the mechanism to control or eliminate rivals or opponents of the political generals.”
At that time, police commanders were chosen directly from the military–as remains the case in neighbouring Burma today. Into the 1960s and ’70s, the police force was redirected, under the military command structure, to work as a counter-insurgency organisation. Throughout the subsequent decades it remained strongly under the control of the military, which also itself built links to organised crime.
It was only in recent years with more substantive changes to the management of the state in Thailand and the assumption of power by a police officer-cum-businessman that the police began to take on a power of their own. Agencies that were traditionally under military officers were placed in the hands of police or bureaucrats under their sway; top government ministers were former police, and other bodies that should have been headed by civilians, such as the Department of Special Investigation and the Election Commission, also ended up with police officers in charge.
The real purpose of proposed police reforms at this time, and especially decentralisation, is to put an end to all of that. This can be understood with reference to an important change in the structure of the security apparatus announced in recent weeks. General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, the head of the coup group, has quietly ordered that authority over the once-powerful Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) be transferred from the prime minister back to the army. ISOC, which was established in 1969, has a murky history as a US-backed counter-insurgency coordinating agency that was allegedly behind the many killings of left-wing activists and peasant leaders in the mid-1970s. It is now apparently to be revamped, its powers greatly expanded under a new law and is to be given a big injection of cash and manpower. All of that is intended, among other things, to enable ISOC to monitor critics of the military junta and its interim government. General Sonthi has also ordered all security agencies to come under the command’s auspices, including nominally independent agencies, notably the National Counter Corruption Commission and the Department of Special Investigation. Here is the real intention of the current government when it talks about police reforms: a return to a 1970s model of social control with police subordinate to soldiers and everybody else subordinate to both. This is not reform; it is deep regression.
What should really be done to reform the police in Thailand? Ultimately, the main problem is not one of where power is located or who specifically is in charge of what. The main problem rests with the notion of command responsibility. This principle–that where a wrong is committed by a subordinate officer, the superior officers also are liable–does not in practice exist in any agency in Thailand. In an established system of policing, even one incident of serious torture or extrajudicial killing may cause the resignation, and perhaps subsequent investigation, of senior officers, alongside special inquiries to determine what went wrong. But in Thailand, as in most parts of Asia, no such connection is made. Despite a complex hierarchy of command on paper, in reality blame rarely extends–where there is any blame at all–beyond the officers directly involved. On the contrary, the only time that the hierarchy is clearly operative is when superior officers act to publicly defend their subordinates, even going so far as to lodge criminal cases against persons who accuse their underlings of wrongdoing. In these circumstances, whether power is situated under someone in Bangkok or someone in a provincial capital, someone in the civilian administration or someone in the army, the end result will be little different.
What does enforcement of command responsibility imply? It implies that the public be able to make complaints against the police, have them investigated, and have alleged perpetrators and their superiors charged and punished. This implies that institutions outside of the police force and military are functioning to obtain these ends. It implies the setting up of independent agencies to receive and investigate complaints and begin criminal proceedings, as was proposed to Thailand by the UN Human Rights Committee in 2005. It implies an effective and independent Witness Protection Office, not one that is wholly reliant upon the police force to get anything done, as at present. It implies dramatic strengthening of the Central Institute of Forensic Science and establishing other specialised independent agencies, such as the long-proposed missing persons’ centre, to counterbalance the authority of the police. It implies removing all police and military control of investigative agencies not directly under their command, in particular, the Department of Special Investigation. It implies relinquishing the exclusive police control over ordinary criminal investigations and expanding the powers of public prosecutors. It implies that there shall be judicial inquiries into all cases of extraordinary deaths in custody and alleged killings by the police, including both the thousands of persons killed during the 2003 “war on drugs” and the large-scale killings committed by the army in April and October 2004.
These, among many other proposals, have been put forward by the Asian Human Rights Commission and other human rights groups and advocates after detailed studies of the situation in Thailand over some years. None of them have been properly considered, let alone implemented. Any administration intent upon genuine reforms to policing in Thailand will have to change that, and do it comprehensively, not by picking and choosing what to work on in order to score political points against the previous government while acting largely in its own interests.
It is disingenuous of the current military-appointed interim government to propose that it will solve problems with policing by decentralisation: the problems that it will solve are those of the military, not those of the public. The latter require a long-term plan to bring the notion of command responsibility home to the security forces of Thailand: and that is an area in which both the army and the police are in equal need of reform. Accountability obliges liability. Anything less is mere rhetoric.
