Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing arrest records and the reason I thought of making this video was I recently read an article in the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Cops to erase files of cleared suspects. Quoting directly: "The Royal Thai Police is deleting criminal investigation records of anyone who has faced legal charges but later been cleared of the offenses." Quoting further: "The new policy is intended to do away with the burden of people having to formally request the files be deleted themselves." Quoting further: "The Assistant Police Chief said that if the records were left on file and a check was performed, a person who had been cleared of offenses may unfairly lose their chance of employment." 

Interesting. There is kind of this residual, I guess it is a residual record left in the Thai Police database resulting from an arrest notwithstanding exoneration or the case being thrown out or maybe the case just timed out and it just never went far enough to where a conviction was gained and therefore it is no longer really all that valid. Yeah it can have a detrimental impact on for example people seeking jobs, people may be seeking to work for the Government later etc. if they haven't been convicted, they haven’t been convicted and just having been arrested is not in and of itself something to for lack of a better term be overly worried about.

I find it interesting that this is a very different tack than that which is taken for example in the United States well yes that are expungements and things if a person proactively tries to get that off their record, but generally speaking and I am speaking in a general sense, I know different things happen in different jurisdictions, but generally speaking arrest records can tend to follow you around. I have seen this many times in the context of US Immigration, they just have a tendency to just kind of for lack of a better term again just follow you around. They can be rather sticky in a sense and even if you don't have a conviction on them and I have seen cases especially again in the US Immigration context where this documentation oftentimes has to be presented and explained notwithstanding the fact there is a lack of conviction.

So again, these are issues that are definitely something to worry about. I think Thailand has taking probably a pretty good approach on this in dealing with this kind of thing. It remains to be seen. We will definitely keep you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.