Prachatai recently received a police summons.

No, don't start worrying. There was nothing in it. But one detail that I want to bring to your attention is that the stamp on the envelope containing the summons was bought at the personal expense of the police officer who had been assigned to the case.

There's something strange about how the police force is funded.

Some years ago I was in a police station, helping the police in their inquiries. No, not in that sense. There had been a traffic accident involving a non-Thai speaking farang and I was acting as unpaid, volunteer, accidental interpreter.

It wasn't a pleasant experience. The witnesses were unanimous. The farang was in the wrong. Even the farang admitted what he did. But he tried the novel legal defence of claiming he had to break the law and hit someone else's car or he would have had to wait too long to make his turn. The police officer decided he was the guilty party and should pay a fine.

There then followed a torrent of abuse about police corruption in Thailand that taxed both my patience and linguistic abilities. I skipped the worst bits and while we waited for this farang's secretary to come and pay the fine out of company funds (so much for corruption), I felt my neutrality would not be seriously compromised if I expressed some sympathy for the police officer after the unwarranted abuse he had taken.

And we got chatting about corruption and police work in general. He explained to me that he'd had to buy, with his own money, every piece of equipment on his desk, from the stapler to the typewriter. He'd even had to buy the desk.

Now this is odd. Other government officials don't do this. Teachers don't have to buy their own desks; nurses don't buy their own syringes; and firemen don't have to buy their own fire engines. (Not when we've got an ex-governor of Bangkok to make tax-payers buy them at corruptly inflated prices.)

But just suppose you wanted to establish a corrupt system. How would you go about it?

You could try to recruit the least moral members of society and leave them to it. But there would be the risk that a few good apples would sneak in and spoil things with a hue and cry, and public pressure would demand higher recruitment standards.

Rather than depend on the dishonesty of the individual, over which you would have little control, it might be more effective if you devised a way of forcing everyone to become dishonest, whether they wanted to or not.

And an organization that sets your job description high but your level of pay low, and then deprives you of the means to do what you're ‘paid' to do would be a pretty good option.

But even then, you're going to get some goody-two-shoes who do make the personal sacrifice and do an honest job despite the obstacles you've put in their path.

What you then need is an internal market for corruption. And we've apparently got one.

You see, as in any large organization, a policeman can't do everything himself. The policeman rattled off an exonerating report with commendable speed. He then had to hang about for an hour or more waiting for someone else to log it and make a copy for signature. Such inefficient hold-ups are apparently common in the police bureaucracy. But there is a way round them.

One policeman can bribe another to get the work done pronto.

Now this puts the would-be virtuous policeman in a dilemma. Does he do things by the book, consequently not get much done, and take the flak from an outraged public who will readily curse police inefficiency without properly knowing who should be cursed? Or does he cut a few minorly corrupt corners and provide the public with the police service they should get?

Either way, we are sure of getting a bad copper.