After a Facebook publish displaying a bike checkpoint accused police of destroying tourism, the Phuket Provincial Police fired back. The post was made in Thai within the Phuket Sandbox – SHA Plus Facebook group on Sunday and went viral as it blamed site visitors police for robbing foreigners now that tourists are returning.
The post was accompanied by photos of a site visitors checkpoint proper by the tourist hotspot of Bangla Road, at The Kitchen restaurant next to the TaiPan nightclub on Rath-U-Thit 200 Pi Road. It stated that police there have been robbing tourists by stopping them and checking that they were following visitors laws.
The Phuket Provincial Police responded to the publish by saying that they had been just doing their job in imposing traffic laws. They asked the original poster or others to report any instances the place foreigners were being robbed as the post claimed. They stated that site visitors checks are a normal part of their job with the intention of increasing road safety and decreasing visitors accidents.
“Some tourists usually are not acquainted with the roads and have no idea the traffic legal guidelines, and due to totally different laws, traditions and cultures, this will likely trigger accidents and harm to the motorists themselves or others and the property of the tourists themselves.”
The police additionally went additional to defend themselves and released statistics of site visitors stops to show that they are not biased or focusing on foreigners of their checkpoints. In fact, the statistics they launched showed that a higher share of Thai vacationers were stopped and charged with traffic offences as opposed to foreign vacationers.
They showed that zero.67% of the 374,117 home tourists recorded as coming into Phuket from October sixteen to November 23 have been stopped and cited for site visitors offences, a complete of two,507 Thai folks. In Results , 129 of the 36,549 worldwide travellers who entered Phuket had been cited for breaking site visitors laws, which is simply zero.43%.
The publish also cited pre-Covid-19 statistics of 4,785 minor injuries, 117 serious injuries, and 129 deaths in traffic accidents in Phuket in 2019. They urged all folks, Thai and foreign, to be safe and observe site visitors guidelines. With the return of vacationers in growing numbers although, many are reporting elevated police presence and a few claim international vacationers are targeted in areas like Chalong, Cherng Talay, Kamala, and Rawai..