Pol Sr Sgt Maj Suphan Chamnit may soon be on his way out of the police force and into a jail cell, but his recent exploits have provided some insight into the way Thai society has benefitted from the 12 core values that Prime Minister Gen Prayut has bestowed on the nation.

Just over a week ago Pol Sr Sgt Maj Suphan was manning a checkpoint in Chonburi when Nares Rojboonsongsri hove into view on his bike.  A very big bike.  A biker’s bike.

Now bikers don’t like checkpoints and the police officers manning them don’t like bikers.  What happened next in this atmosphere of mutual dislike is a matter of contention but the end result was that Nares came off his bike at speed, his bike crashed, and Nares was left dead in the road.  Witnesses testify to a gunshot at the moment when rider and bike parted company.

According to Pol Sr Sgt Maj Suphan, he fired a warning shot harmlessly into the air and coincidentally Nares fell off his bike.  The first post mortem at a private hospital found that Nares had died of a ‘head injury’.  

Now in farang courtroom dramas, witnesses swear to tell ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’.  Obviously in Thailand, when a police officer is involved, it is better to stop after ‘the truth’ and not bother with ‘the whole truth’.  

After all, a fatal bullet wound destroying half the brain, which is what the second post mortem found, is a sort of ‘head injury’.  But not one that comes from falling off a bike.  Nor from a shot in the air.

Now which of the 12 core values were the employees of the private hospital following here?  No. 2 (being honest)?  Well, not when the honesty is incomplete and misleading.  No 8 (maintaining discipline, respectful of laws and the elderly and seniority)?  Well only if Pol Sr Sgt Maj Suphan is in fact older and if anyone with an official rank is senior.  

So it must be No. 5 (treasuring the precious Thai tradition).  That’s the tradition of seeking to save the face of someone in authority by sacrificing the truth. 

In this case, the officer’s superiors did not accept at face value the excuse of a ‘shot in the air’ and suspended him pending an inquiry.

But the national police chief still felt it necessary to look for mitigating circumstances.  Pol Gen Somyot Pumphanmuang told reporters that even if Suphan was found guilty, his behaviour may not be considered excessive in other countries.

“If this thing happened in United States of America, it wouldn’t be considered excessive,” said the good General, hand-picked for the job by the good Generals of the NCPO.  “In the US, or other countries with violent crimes, the police can shoot you just because you don’t raise your hands up.”

So the only lesson that our head of police can take from the news reports from Ferguson is that someone got shot by the police because he didn’t raise his hands (when in fact he did raise his hands) and that is acceptable (when in fact it caused national protests, a scathing Department of Justice report, the resignations of numerous ranking policemen and the effective suspension of the town’s entire police force).

And what’s this about ‘the US, or other countries with violent crimes’?  The latest figure from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime for the intentional homicide rate per 100,000 population per year in the US is 4.7.  And for Thailand it is 5.0.  

Now the definitions of intentional homicide are nowhere near uniform (even between states of the US) so not that much should be read into these statistics.  But Gen Somyot would have a hard case proving that the US is so much more violent than Thailand that the Thai police are being held to stricter standards of behaviour.  

And what values is Pol Gen Somyot displaying here?  No. 4 (seeking knowledge and education directly and indirectly)?  Hard to square with his ignorance of things foreign.  No. 12 (putting the public and national interest before personal interest)?  But that would mean getting trigger-happy cops off the streets rather than making up fairy-tale excuses.

I’m afraid that it must be No. 5 again, this time the tradition being that of the patron defending the client no matter what stupidity the client has committed.

Pol Sr Sgt Maj Suphan didn’t help his cause when a few evenings later he smashed his car into a parked vehicle in a state that could perhaps be charitably described as ‘overwrought’.  As in ‘overwrought as a newt’.  

The local police apparently failed to book him for drunk driving because their breathalyser was in the shop for repairs.  And of course there are no other means of determining the sobriety or otherwise of a fellow officer.

And yes, I think this must be another example of value No. 5, the precious Thai tradition here being to look out for your phuak and sod the rest of you.

Come to think of it, I don’t know why Gen Prayut couldn’t have just had the one core value.  It seems to be the only one that anyone respects.

Oh, but what am I thinking?  I was forgetting that other precious Thai tradition, the one that requires layer upon layer of useless padding in any official pronouncement.