Although Siam's New Detectives is not the only or first book in English that addresses the history of the Thai police (for example, see Chambers [Reference Chambers2014]), the book makes unique contributions to the literature. The book not only narrates the institutional and cultural histories of the police and visual evidence forms for crime investigation in a thorough fashion, but it also provides a unique view that such forms are a tool with which we can understand the current ‘detective state’ politics in Thailand. As a historical analysis of form, the book attempts to complement the traditional, conventional approach in history that focuses only on interpreting materials’ given meanings. By attending to the material form of image, the author argues, we can be released from confined meanings of symbolic materials and find a new path to reach other, seemingly unrelated historical events.
Mainly, the book chronicles the birth and growth of the modern Thai police force from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Chapter 1 starts by describing the birth and early reform of the nineteenth century police force in detail. Chapter 2 continues to attentively narrate policing reforms in the early twentieth century and why and how visual evidence forms, such as photographs and fingerprints, were adopted as scientific methods for crime investigation in Thailand. This chapter is also valuable from the comparative criminology perspective because such a comprehensive forensic science history has been very rare for a non-Western country (for a brief overview of the history of forensic science, see Bell [Reference Bell2008]).
In chapters 3 and 4, the author introduces how the “modern concepts about time and space became naturalized and were used to justify constant police surveillance and preemptive violence” (p. 63) using the examples of crime scene maps and reenactments. Especially, by closely examining how reenactments were utilized, the book takes a further step. The stable-looking facticity of the evidence is, the author argues, derived from aesthetic rules under interactions with outside actors such as the mass media, and thus is easily manipulable and not as inert as we believe. In addition, the book argues that visual evidence forms, as a diagram, not just represent what exists but also have the power to generate new information that can be easily abused.
Based on the unfolded vulnerable nature of visual evidence forms, the author tries in Chapter 5 to connect the formation of the current ‘detective state’ status of Thailand with the conspiring murder of the king in 1946, arguing that the state forces competently abused the visual evidence to justify the use of physical force, moulding a strong police state. In a conspiracy-prevalent situation like the 1946 murder case, conspiracy theories “confuse what reality might be and then bind people to the deception through their participation” (p. 135) since people “perpetually question official accounts of current events and look instead to alternative explanations” (p. 142). In that sense, the author argues, Thai people searching for unnamable, powerful, and ill-intentioned hidden figures who may drive Thailand's history are ‘Siam's New Detectives’, as the title reads.
Although Siam's New Detectives has many strengths as a history project, including the book being a form-focused approach in history using exquisite writing style and affluent, circumstantiated vernacular examples, there are a few points that should be addressed. First, compared to the previous chapters, Chapter 5 does not look cohesive. The explanations on conspiracy theory per se, which apparently seem to have little to do with visual evidence and the criminal justice system, are too long. The author also does not appropriately make it clear why and where the conspiracy theory positions exist in the context of visual crime evidence. Rather, the author may confuse readers by simply introducing them in the chapter where he argues, “the development of this unfortunate situation … is linked directly to Post-World War II trends in international politics and economics … and the brutal deployment of physical force” (p. 114).
In addition, although the author argues “aesthetic rules are needed to preserve an object's facticity.… Because these formal considerations developed over time, it can be argued that so, too, did the factuality of evidence” (p. 60), I am concerned that the role of aesthetic rules might be misleadingly read and thus be overestimated from a criminologist's practical perspective. Of course, aesthetic rule development may additionally unfold the hidden factuality of the evidence, or may even fabricate new information, as the author argues. However, practically speaking, differences in factuality with the development of aesthetic rules may not be always critical for an individual crime investigation case. For example, wrongdoings and misjudgements in crime investigations and trials are still prevalent when failing to detect the truth, even in developed countries with up-to-date evidence formats such as DNA or microscopic analyses (Faigman et al., Reference Faigman, Saks, Sanders and Edward2008).
Despite some notable weaknesses above, I strongly believe this book is worth reading for professionals who study history as well as to those who are interested in the history of the Thai police.
