Just as a new term began last month, attacks involving rival students of different institutions have taken off again. Police have come up with some new measures to deter the violence and hunt for the attackers.
Pol Col Tosak Sukwimol, chief of the commando unit of the Crime Suppression Division (CSD), is heading efforts to suppress student attackers who sometimes hurt or even kill innocent bystanders.
Recently, two students were wounded by students from a rival vocational school in Pathum Thani’s Thanyaburi district. One student sustained a gunshot wound and the other suffered cuts from a sword.
On the evening of the same day, two students, both 15, were injured, one seriously, in a shooting near the Min Buri intersection on Suwinthawong Road in Bangkok. The crime scene was close to a traffic police booth.
The students were riding their motorcycle when three men, dressed in vocational-style uniforms, chased them on another motorcycle and opened fire, hitting one student. The other was hurt when he fell off the motorcycle.
The students were on their way home from a job. They told police they had no idea why anyone would want to harm them.
In another incident of student violence affecting the innocent, a pregnant woman and female street vendor were wounded by stray bullets fired by four students on two motorcycles at other students at a bus stop outside a convenience store in the Rom Klao area of Bangkok last Tuesday.
The next day, police caught two teenagers, 15 and 16, who admitted to having fired the shots. They told police they shot randomly at students from a rival school. Six areas are considered high-risk zones for student violence, says Pol Col Tosak. The areas are Min Buri, Bang Kapi, Bang Na, Don Muang, Rangsit in Pathum Thani and parts of Sukhumvit Road.
The areas have large concentrations of vocational schools which are sometimes connected to fatal brawls. Some areas are the locations of bus interchanges where the students have been known to gather.
Pol Col Tosak said three measures are being implemented to thwart the violence. First, regular patrols by the CSD’s commandos are being conducted twice a day, between 7.30am and 9.30am and between 3pm and 6pm in high risk areas.
Second, undercover agents are sent to schools where students are known to engage in inter-school brawls to gather information about students and alumni who incited or carried out the attacks. The agents also find out where the students keep the weapons used in the attacks.
Finally, the unit prepares fast-deployment teams to promptly respond to any alerts about student attacks so they have a better chance of hunting down the suspects and narrowing their search for weapon hiding places.
Dr Duangta Kraiphatsaphong, an expert in forensic psychiatry with the Galyarajanagarindra Institute of the Mental Health Department, said parents should take an active role in helping reduce student violence.
“Parents of suspects have to demonstrate their intention to take responsibility for their children’s actions by offering to help victims’ families. This will encourage their children to come out and face reality.”
After that, the young attackers should be required to attend a programme where they are interviewed by specialists and speak openly about why they attacked their peers. The process helps them feel remorse and account for their crime, Dr Duangta said.
More importantly, students can help improve the situation by sharing their past mistakes with their peers at school so other students can draw lessons from what happened, she added..
Dr Duangta said that it is more effective for youths to learn from their peers than being told what to do by adults.
She went on to say that the process of requiring juvenile delinquents to warn other youths should be promoted as a way to help reconcile differences between rival students.
(Courtesy of the Bangkok Post)