Pattaya To Pay Medical Bills of Crime Victims

Pattaya City Hall Meeting...
Trying to reduce crime against tourists.Personally, I would rather that Pattaya's city government focused on stopping crime (which they are of course doing) than offering placations and niceties. But offering to pay the hospital bills of tourist crime victims is still a nice gesture nonetheless.

It makes economic sense though to try to lessen the blow of being the victim of a crime while on vacation: Crimes against tourists in Pattaya are literally crimes against the tourist industry. Obviously, fighting crime with every ounce that Pattaya can muster should be the first priority.

Tripling the size of the police force, with a massive increase in street patrols that constantly harass young Thai kids riding around on motorcycles after midnight would help. This is Thailand. How about some of those world-famous abuses of police power here in Pattaya? How about some racial profiling and targeted law enforcement? How about... if you are a gang of single, young Thai guys on motorcycles out at 1:00 a.m... making Pattaya, Jomtien, and Naklua into a miserable hassle of endless pull-overs, police questions, police pat-downs, and police drunk-driving checks? How about closing the internet cafés at 10:00 p.m., and sending all the 12-year-old kids home? How about closing the karoke bars at 2:00 a.m., and sending all the 17-year-old gangsters home?

Pattaya is already famous as the unruly, dangerous Wild West frontier town in the English press, and as a result, there are almost no English-speaking "family tourists" coming to Pattaya anymore. As soon as the foreign language internet and foreign language press and foreign language travel industries start reporting the crime statistics of Pattaya in Russian, German, Swedish, Korean, and Chinese, there won't be a single "family tourist" left in town. All that will be left are gay and straight men hitting the gogo bars looking for Mr. or Miss Right Now (at discount prices, natch).

A complete lack of faily tourists won't kill Pattaya, since the sex tourists are by far the highest spending (i.e. most valuable) tourists Pattaya receives, and one sex tourist is literally the economic equivalent of one busload of Chinese tourists, but eventually there comes a time when the reputation of a town is indelibly fixed. In truth, Pattaya is probably already permanently stained with the "crime and sex capitol of Thailand" label for the English-speaking world, but turning that reputation around before the Eurotrash find out about it would avert a lot of economic hardship.