Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing "Big Joke" yet again. That is Surachate "Big Joke" Hakparn who is currently the Deputy National Police Chief here in Thailand. We have been following him for a while ever since he's been the Head of Thai Immigration but he seems to do things to keep himself in the headlines so we keep on top of what he is doing. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from Thai PBS World, that is thaipbsworld.com, the article is titled: Over 9.3 million people cleared from police criminal record files. Quoting directly: "More than 9.3 million people have had their names removed from police criminal record files, having been found not guilty and acquitted, were fined or were given mild sentences by the Court, according to Pol Gen Surachate Hakparn the Deputy National Police Chief."

So a lot of things going on here. Basically it looks like they are updating their record keeping database and as a result of that they are going ahead and doing some purging of a lot of unnecessary information they have on file. For those who have either been arrested and acquitted, or those who have been arrested over something minor, this will probably cause you to breathe a little easier; they are going ahead and purging you from the system so you are not sort of having all your stuff sitting around there. What is also noteworthy though is if you have pending things, or there is stuff out there that you have just kind of let twist in the wind kind of hoping it will just go away, I imagine that these changes to the database are going to result in far more efficiency with respect to ascertaining who is in the system, who has pending warrants for example, who failed to appear, these kinds of things and as a result this may not be good news for everybody out there because the system may be getting an upgrade and as a result of that upgrade we may seem more situations wherein folks are more easily ascertained or more efficiently ascertained by the law enforcement apparatus here Thailand. Not unlike the way digitization of the records associated with Thai Immigration have resulted in more apprehensions, more deportations, more findings of overstay in the Immigration context, we may find something similar happens in the context of Thai Law enforcement generally where again folks that may have an outstanding warrant or may have a "failure to appear" on them, those folks they may have in a paper sort of analog system been kind of harder to ascertain. Now again it may be more efficient and we may see a situation moving forward where we may see more people arrested in those kind of circumstances.