Thai arrests and pointing at things

This is something that still gets some laughs out of me because I don't really understand what the, ahem, point is of it all. No matter what the crime is, it seems as though the perpetrators are required to point at whatever it is that they are meant to have done. I think there must be some legal precedent or something like that but it doesn't seem to matter if it is a breaking and entering, drugs, or even something as terrible as murder, the captives are forced to point at whatever it is that is in question.

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Recently a meth drug sting resulted in two people getting busted with some low level amount of the stuff and then the police make them stand there and point at the gear in question. I can't really even tell what they are pointing at but according to the police report it was 660 "ya ba" (meth) pills and when you get caught with that much of the stuff I think claiming it is for personal use is kind of difficult to argue.

The police also always like to point out that a certain number of mobile phones were also found at the scene and in this case it was two because there are two people involved. Doesn't that seem a bit silly to you? Of course two people are going to have two mobile phones.

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Nobody is pointing at anything so I don't know what we are supposed to be looking at.

later on there is another police tradition of sorts where they arrange everything in a nice organized fashion and then the officers involved line up behind the people to get a photo as well. To me, if some of these officers were undercover, which the "Avenged Sevenfold" t-shirts and other non-professional gear they have on would indicate, isn't this kind of bad to have their identities so widely distributed? I don't understand law-enforcement in this country but whatever, Meth is bad and I'm glad that these people were caught.

There is one thing that is worth pointing out though. Despite the fact that this couple was caught with somewhat near the same amount of drugs as some Burmese people were caught with a few weeks ago, they never referred to the suspects as "kingpins" or "drug lords" the way that they tend to do when the dealers are foreigners.

But the pointing at things is so common and so ingrained in the law-enforcement community that someone actually made a website called "Thaispointingatthings.com" which unfortunately is no longer live

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I guess it was fun while it lasted. About the above image though, it is a good thing those people were there to point out what the photo was in reference to, because if they hadn't been I wouldn't have been able to figure out was amiss about the pic.

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What's the issue? I don't understand what the hullabaloo is? Oh you mean the elephant in your yard? Ok, glad you cleared that up.

I was really disappointed to see that this website isn't live anymore but I suppose there isn't a lot of money in free laughs and they eventually got tired of paying for the domain.

As far as meth dealers getting busted is concerned: This is just a daily thing in Thailand to the point where it really isn't news anymore unfortunately. Every now and then the government likes to talk big about how they are tough on drug crime and what not but they must not be, because it seems like there are an awful lot of people that aren't overly concerned about getting caught doing it.

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