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Police Chief Ends Roadside Checkpoints in Thailand

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing roadside checkpoints in Thailand. Now we don't really get into this kind of thing all that often on this channel but it is noteworthy. 

In a recent article, this came from Thai Visa, and they were quoting INN, and the title in Thai Visa is: Thailand's New Police Chief Lays Down the Law: No More Checkpoints Nationwide. Quoting directly: "Thailand's new Police Chief has begun his term in office by making a sweeping change that will affect the entire country. Police General Suwat Chaengyodsuk has called for an immediate end to all forms of roadside checkpoints in the country. An order ending the notoriously unpopular roadside checks was dated yesterday and published by INN." This was initially published October 6th, it looks like, 2020. 

So this is pretty big news. The roadside checkpoints are now a thing of the past at least at least they are for now. What does this mean? Well first of all let's hold off a second. This doesn't mean you are not going to have traffic cops. It just means that the checkpoints, especially here in Bangkok that were once rather common and oftentimes we found in a lot of our criminal cases that folks who had real problems in a criminal context, oftentimes it originated at a roadside checkpoint. So again, while in certain ways this may have some substantially negative consequences, maybe in a certain context, I think overall especially from the standpoint of civil liberties this was a really good idea and I think there is also a better way to practice law enforcement than the sweeping catch-all checkpoints that in my opinion probably do more harm than good when you look at it from a macro context. So this is really quite a good thing. I think that hopefully we are going to see maybe some more trends in this vein from this new Head of Police here in Thailand and hopefully we will see them sooner rather than later.