Phuket Opinion: Enough already
PHUKET: The two criminals involved in the horrible killing of 60-year-old Australian travel agent Michelle Smith are now behind bars.
Thursday 12 July 2012, 09:09AM
We applaud the speed with which the two were arrested, and the thorough police work that went into securing their capture.
The Phuket News does not like reporting violent crime – we really don’t – and we would feel much better if there was a lot less of it.
But we also feel that we have to do so, if only so that readers will be more aware of the dangers on the streets of this island “paradise”.
The question now is, “What will the police and the government do, not only to catch more such criminals, but to go further and prevent such evil from taking place again?”
Plainly this will be on the minds of very senior Thai Police officers.
The one good thing to have come out of this horrific affair is that no one, from Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra down, can claim they don’t know there’s a problem.
Already, there is talk of Phuket being blanketed with at least 10,000 CCTV cameras – and that’s just the official ones; resorts will undoubtedly be beefing up their own security, both inside and out, with more cameras.
There has also been talk of reviving the network of walkie-talkie-equipped private citizens that was established after the 2004 Asian Tsunami, and using them as eyes and ears on the ground, tracking criminals.
But all of this is reactive – it helps police to catch perpetrators after a crime has taken place – not to prevent the crime itself.
As Benjamin Franklin said a couple of hundred years ago, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And everyone would feel safer on the streets.
