Originally Posted by
transpac
It would be good if the OP could identify if they were Bangkok Metropolitan Police or Royal Thai Police.
The BMA guys who throw their half-eaten chicken wings to the ground and then walk past twenty Thai people who just threw various plastic bags / cigarettes / food items onto the footpath to stalk you on a bicycle to see if a hair drops so they can ask you to pay 2000 baht for littering are not police!
You mean the guys in the little huts around Emporium etc, right ?
They are NOT police. Just BMA goons in a deliberately police-like uniform. They don't have the same powers of arrest as actual police and cannot search you. In Australia the equivalent would be a park ranger or special constable who is attached to a municipality or the EPA. They are two levels below a mall cop and 2 levels below an actual street cop.
I have on occasion experienced what the OP described. Each time it was a courteous process. Taxi gets stopped, couple of cops walk up, size up the pax, check if everyone has ID on them and send us on our way. Once or twice they might have asked me to produce the contents of my pockets. Never been extorted or set-up or had anything stolen this way. It was legit police work (a rare thing in BKK
).
Years ago when I started driving a car up and down Sukhumvit I thought it's gonna be a mess because some expat fora give you the impression that police will stop every foreigner they see driving for a shake-down.
In fact I have driven past police dozens of times and been waved through many check-points without incident. 3 times I had been stopped and hassled and each time it was justified because I was driving like an idiot.
Some districts were less professional than others but I have not yet been accused of something I didn't do. In all three cases I violated traffic rules (as you must in BKK) and happened to get caught. In all cases a real ticket was issued, my license was retained and I went to the station the next day to pay the fine, get a receipt and my license back ^
In summary: Yes they are useless and many are corrupt
but we aren't really being targeted. ^ Real police work does happen from time to time. ^