Police arriving one year late at an early-morning traffic accident on Sukhumwit Road found an unusual scene.
A car appeared to have slammed at high speed into a police motorcycle, killing the Police Sergeant Major riding it, and dragging his body for a city block. A trail of leaking oil led to a house on nearby Thong Lo where police found a Ferrari FF with signs of having recently being involved in a serious accident.
Curiously, however, the house number on the gate post had been covered in black paint, as had the licence plate, engine block number and road tax certificate on the vehicle in question. Every page of the vehicle registration booklet was also covered in black ink.
Persons present in the house at the time, who were all wearing white Guy Fawkes masks, said that this was the normal practice among well-to-do families when any incident of this kind occurred. This was, they claimed, the correct procedure laid down by the Privileged and Rich Association of Thailand, of which their family was a founder member. (This claim was, however, later denied by a PRAT spokesperson.)
Police attempts to identify the owner of the vehicle were stymied by the lack of an address. Ignoring information freely offered by a crowd of neighbours, local vendors and passers-by, who all knew who lived there, a Crime Suppression Division forensic expert suggested looking at the numbers of the houses in the two adjacent properties. With the aid of a sophisticated computer programme, police detectives quickly calculated the correct number of the house.
The police team charged with identifying the Ferrari were facing a similar blank wall. Suggestions from bystanders that they wipe the licence plate clean with turpentine spirit from a bottle in the family garage were rejected. This would be tantamount to illegal use of private property. Besides, if any turps spilled onto the bodywork of the severely crumpled Ferrari, it could cause expensive damage for which the police feared they would be prosecuted.
They decided that the only way to identify the car and its owner was to monitor the annual car registrations, waiting for a Ferrari FF that failed to appear for re-registration by its due date and then follow the leads that this would give. This of course could take almost a year and would risk the expiry of the statute of limitations. But the police officer in charge said that it was better to be slow and sure than to rush to judgement.
However, when the breakthrough on the address was made, the police realized they were able to identify the car and its owner through the registration address.
Establishing the driver of the car at the time of the accident was the next problem for the police to solve. Examination of the traffic CCTV footage (before it was mysteriously pixellated) revealed, as normal, that the definition was too poor to make out the face behind the tinted windows (and even too poor to read the licence plate).
At this point, public outrage grew at what was seen as police dithering, or even incompetence, in dealing with the crime. Even though one of their own number was the victim, there were widespread allegations that the investigators were deliberately dragging their feet because of the influence of the family of the alleged perpetrator.
This had the potential of damaging the public image of the police force. The police officer in charge of the investigation therefore called a press conference to deny these accusations. Appearing with a bag over his head and his name tags removed, the anonymous officer said that the police were doing all in their power to present as strong a case as possible to the public prosecutor and to avoid ruining their own reputation, though not necessarily in that order.
He pointed out that the police had encountered numerous difficulties in this case. The Office of the Attorney-General, for example, had painted over the signs outside their building and the police were no longer sure where to send the documents to seek an indictment. Asked by a reporter if he could see a quick end to the investigation, the officer replied that with this bag over his head he couldn’t see a bloody thing.
Reporters attempting to file stories on this incident discovered that a programme inserted into all newspaper computer systems by order of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology automatically redacted any reference the name and address of the alleged perpetrator and his family. It also blacked out any attempt to type the expressions Ferrari, police incompetence and equality before the law.
When asked to explain this blatant censorship, a MICT spokesperson said that it was not a question of censorship. It was merely an attempt to prevent press speculation from influencing judicial proceedings and preventing a fair trial for the alleged perpetrator.
Whoever that was.
About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).
And if you believe any of those stories, you might believe his columns.
