Members of the public are helping to find criminals
Wassayos Ngamkham
Region 7 chief Pol Lt-Gen Worapong Chewpreecha shows the reply an SMS spy would receive after alerting police about a suspicious individual. |
Behind the arrests of more than 1,000 suspects and the recovery of many stolen vehicles by Police Region 7 officers over the past year has been the 650 "SMS spies", most of them factory owners.
The "SMS spy" plan is now the second project after the first started early last year when police issued residents a calendar featuring pictures of wanted criminals. Since the second project started police have discovered how helpful locals can be when they become the authorities' eyes and ears.
"We needed help. There are well over 20,000 people who have had arrest warrants issued for them in our jurisdiction. The problem is, how do we find the bad guys in a crowd. Police might walk past thieves or dine with them, without knowing," said Region 7 chief Worapong Chewpreecha.
His office is responsible for eight provinces in the lower Central Plains - Nakhon Pathom, Ratchaburi, Samut Songkhram, Samut Sakhon, Kanchanaburi, Phetchaburi, Prachuap Khiri Khan and Suphan Buri.
Apart from the 20,000 suspects, more than 10,000 cars and motorcycles have been reported missing.
"Distributing arrest warrants to policemen was a waste of time. If we piled them up, the stack would be about one foot thick. Who is going to carry them around?" he asked.
As a solution, a database of warrants and lost vehicles was set up for officers to call in to check. But the verification process took hours.
The regional chief then came up with the idea of using the short message services (SMS) on mobile phones.
Officers on patrol, traffic police and investigators simply type in the name or ID numbers of suspects, the licence plates or engine numbers of suspicious vehicles and send the message to police. They get an SMS reply in five to 15 seconds.
The reply will be: "[name], [ID number], is wanted. Contact [name of police] at [station]."
The service is limited to phones on the AIS system.
After the E-Cop programme was in place, police started recruiting their "SMS spies".
Many civilians signed up, but only those who passed a detailed background check had their phones registered and underwent a three-hour training course.
Pol Lt-Gen Worapong assured them their identities would not be revealed, even to AIS. Their information is securely protected on the police computer servers.
He added that the police spies have no power to arrest or seek financial gain from the suspects - they can only alert police.
Since the police started recruiting their spies in March last year, mobile messages from the spies have been responsible for the arrest of 1,150 suspects and the recovery of 88 vehicles, three of them sedans, from more than four million SMSs sent.
"Most of our spies are factory owners. They meet many people, especially job seekers. Typically, factories ask the Criminal Records Division to check on their job applicants, but wait months for answers," he said.
"The database has now included suspects in the deep South, in case they go into hiding in our areas," Pol Lt-Gen Worapong added.
System administrator Thaworn Kaosa-ard gave an impressive example of how police SMS-checked a suspect on charges of possessing a gun and found he was wanted for attempted murder.
One day later, the suspect had two friends visiting him at the police detention cells and officers SMS-checked and quickly rounded up the pair, who were also wanted in the same case of attempted murder.
He said the project is worth the expense. The office gets 20,000 SMSs a month free and pays one baht for each extra message. But their spies bear all the costs of their SMS messages.
"The police chief got our proposal and agreed to launch the nationwide spy project in three months. It will cover all mobile phone systems," Pol Col Thaworn said.
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