Trust in the police is considered vitally important in ensuring that citizens obey the law and cooperate with police officers. However, in recent times, the Royal Thai Police has been facing difficulties with the image of the organization, including lack of public trust resulting from the actions of some police officers. Therefore, this study investigated the level of trust in the police, as well as the factors that cause the public to trust the police. The samples used in this study were 971 residents in eastern Thailand. A questionnaire was used as a tool to collect data that were subjected to ordinary multiple regression analysis to test the hypotheses. The findings showed police effectiveness and fairness had a positive relationship with trust in the police. Age, corruption, and fear of crime had negative relationships with trust in the police. However, victimization had no association with trust in the police. Hence, the Royal Thai Police should place great importance on increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of police officers and treating people equally and fairly. In addition, corruption issues and the solving of crimes should be addressed to provide people with peace of mind and greater trust in the police.

In response to recent issues of prison overcrowding (over 300,000 inmates in prisons with only 110,000 capacity) and court case overloading, Thailand has implemented the conflict resolution practice, including enacting a new law on dispute mediation, as a community justice alternative to reduce cases and prevent them from going into the main criminal justice system. No empirical research has yet been conducted in Thailand to examine the current forms and status of these conflict resolution mechanisms and problems facing the implementation process. Researchers collected qualitative data by interviewing 16 experts and conducting a focus group with 23 experts. The study’s findings revealed five existing mechanisms on conflict resolution across the country, two of which were recently established thanks to the Dispute Mediation Act of 2019. While the study’s findings identified many issues facing the implementation of the conflict resolution process, the main ones were the lack of trained personnel, the lack of adequate data management, insufficient operating budget, and the absence of public awareness and public confidence.

Literature on police training reveals the lack of field training that incorporates community policing, the prevalence of the paramilitary structure among police training programs, and the support for the use of the andragogy approach in police training. The current study fills this gap by examining the virtual parents training program offered at the Royal Police Cadet Academy (RPCA) at the end of the academic year when each second-year cadet spent 15 days with their virtual parents in a rural area. The cadets helped their virtual parents do household chores and participated in other activities in the community. The RPCA’s goals are to instill strong character and good morals in the cadets. Overall, 264 cadets who participated in the survey reported that they were very satisfied with the program and believed the program both enhanced police image and made them less egocentric and more altruistic.

Routine attacks and killings targeted at soldiers, police officers, and local citizens have been going on in the three southernmost provinces of Thailand (Yala, Pattani, and Narathiwat) for over a decade. Although the root cause of the insurgency is still unknown, religion and secession were pointed out by many political analysts. The objective of this study is to find out empirically how different Muslims and Buddhists perceived service quality they received from the police. Data were collected from 540 people who came to police stations for services. Service quality was measured in five dimensions: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. The results of this study reveal that, in the three southernmost provinces of Thailand, Muslims perceived higher service quality from the police than Buddhists.

Traffic accidents have become a major issue in Thailand since the World Health Organization reported in 2018 that Thailand had the second highest death rate of road accidents in the world (over 24,000 deaths each year). Because the effectiveness of traffic enforcement was found to be a key factor that helps reduce the number of traffic accidents, this study examined how well the policy on traffic training programmes has been implemented and how traffic training programmes prepare traffic officials to perform their traffic duties. A random sample of 247 traffic officials was chosen from the four police regions and the Bangkok Metropolitan area to complete a survey. The results of the study show that the implementation of traffic training programmes is inconsistent with the given policy, resulting in traffic officials gaining insufficient knowledge and skills from training to do their work.

Although the literature on online scams reveals the richness of studies in many areas, research on the forms of scam and scammers’ roles during online scam engagement is rare. The current research fills this void by interviewing 15 elder victims of online scams about their experience. The findings show that online scams can be committed individually or as a team, and that the scam can be either victim-initiated contact or fraudster-initiated contact. The analysis of the data reveals four main roles of the scammers (persuader, supporters, manager, and financial person), each of which plays a different but supporting role in order to smoothly convince the victim that their scam is legitimate. The use of information technology (IT) was also found to be a part of the scam mechanism to control and manipulate the victim.