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American Arrested For "Assault And Theft" In Thailand?
Transcript of the above video:
As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing well – and as the thumbnail suggests - it's another kind of one of these incidents of 'foreigners behaving badly' as I call it here in Thailand. Let's just jump right in. I thought of making this video after reading recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: American arrested for theft, assault in Phuket. Quoting directly: "An American man accused of assaulting a Thai woman and stealing her cash and valuables last month was arrested in Phuket on Friday police said. He was taken to Chalong Police Station for further questioning. The victim was contacted to identify the suspect and she confirmed his identity and involvement in the assault and theft. Police also obtained evidence against him, leading to charges of theft being filed. He was held by Police pending legal proceedings." So first of all let's presume the necessary presumptions which you know innocent until proven guilty here in Thailand. This person has not been fully adjudicated nor to the best of my knowledge, has pled guilty to the accusation so at least as of the time this video, this remains an allegation so let's start from that premise.
That being said, I am going to just talk generally here. I don't know where these folks are coming from, these people that are coming out of the woodwork to just come over here to Thailand and cause a problem. I'm not picking on the Americans here, nor the Russians, nor the Chinese, nor anybody else. There just seems to be a lot of folks coming over here to behave badly and some of them may have malice of forethought in their intentions regarding Thailand. Let's first of all go through that and just as a piece of information - maybe for the public's benefit - don't come to Thailand and think you are going to engage in criminal activity and get away with it. You won't. I have watched this over the years, and by criminal I am not talking about "oh I might be able to get away with some cutting of the corners in some regulatory capacity", no, that's not what we're talking about. This sort of ‘gangsterism’, these notions of this glorification of criminality that I have seen throughout the West, you had better not bring that mindset over here because Thailand is not interested in it. If anything, over the past roughly three months that we have seen these escalating incidences of foreigners really causing havoc over here, it is causing the Thais to clamp down heavily and we are seeing it within the paradigm of law enforcement. As we have discussed, there is a new reporting mechanism within Thai Immigration to the Royal Thai Police which is going to be kept up now on I think a fortnightly basis, basically every two weeks, we are seeing a situation where they are reviewing the current status of many of these cases involving foreigners and they are doing that because they are serious about being assiduous in concluding those cases; they don't want to let things languish, they are acting with diligence.
So again the point to take away from this video more than anything, is if you are a criminal and you are looking to come to Thailand as some kind of easy pickings, go somewhere else okay, because Thailand isn't interested.