The thin blue line

For the past few weeks, I've been playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with the Phnom Penh traffic police, a game which ended up with me being photographed waiting by the side of the road as a police officer pondered my punishment.

Before you rush to cancel your standing order, scrub me off your prayer list and start rumours of my rapid moral decline, let me first explain the context because, as with many of these things, context is everything.

To protect and serve?

In Cambodia, the police don't quite perform the same functions as they do back home. Paid a meagre $30 - $40 per month (below the Government's own minimum wage!), traffic police are not so much expected to enfore the law as they are to extract their salaries from unsuspecting drivers. As harsh as it sounds, if you're a policeman, this art of extraction is actually a delicate business.

First of all, you have to target the right people. Stop someone who is a bit too wealthy and you may find they have some powerful connections. One phone call later and your already poor career prospects have worsened considerably. For this reason, it's best to focus on poor people (who are powerless) and foreigners (who are gullible).

Second of all, you have to find the right spot to wait. Chasing people down the streets on a moto will only end you up in hospital. The better option is to pick a shady spot by the side of a road where people are likely to do something wrong, and when they do, jump out into the middle of the road and pull them over. (When this approach fails, I've seen police officers take a swing at the heads of escaping moto-drivers with their baton. Ouch.)

Thirdly, and most importantly of all, you have to find a reason to stop them. With Cambodian traffic law bereft of many of the rules we take for granted back in the UK (like a speeding limit) you often have to just make something up on the spot and hope it works.

Whatever your reason for pulling someone over, just remember - it's not really about safety on the roads, it's about whether your going to get your drinking money for the night or whether your family's going to get three meals a day for the week.

For this reason, police of different varieties will not always 'play it straight' when it comes to doing their job. In fact, pulling over potential traffic violators is quite light in comparison to taking bribes from brothels in exchange for not shutting them down or sharing the spoils of robbers in exchange for agreeing not to catch them. These are a just a few of the less savoury lengths that police will go to to make ends meet.

The outlaw in me

If I'm honest, I've had more than couple of run-ins with the traffic police. In fact, I have been pulled over no less than 7 times (this is not counting the times when I've been innocent and decided therefore to dodge the baton and swerve round them).

The first time they got me, I got stung bad. They got $7 dollars off me for a violation that I now know costs 50 cents (gullible foreigner). On that occasion, I was pulled over for making an illegal left turn although, to be fair, the sign was on the far right-hand side of the road.

Since that time, I've been done for: going the wrong way down a one way street (looked the same as any other street to me), running a red light (it was sunset orange), having my headlight on during the daytime (no common sense arguing could save me from this one) and, more recently, the incident where I ended up being photographed (it was just my luck that I happened to be travelling with a professional photographer on the way to work-related photo shoot!).

The most interesting thing about this incident is that I was stopped for...absolutely no reason! The policeman pulled me over and told me to switch my engine off, at which point I asked: "What did I do wrong"?

In the absence of any red lights or illegal turns, he had to take a different aproach. He first asked for my driver's license, which I duly handed over (failure to produce this would have earned him 50 cents). That having failed, he began to inspect my bike, where upon he informed me that I had the wrong license plate number. When I politely corrected him that my license plate was in fact perfectly legal, he ditched that line of attack and continued his inspection of my bike, where upon he found the offence he'd been looking for.

"Where's your tax disc?," he asked, eyebrows raised and a grin slowly appearing on his face.

Busted.

Acquiring a tax disc in Cambodia is like catching an all night rave in a field in Essex. You have to hear rumours that the Ministry of Traffic is setting up a roadside table selling tax discs. They are only there for a few weeks and once it's over, you have to go visit their offices in the middle of nowhere and get into a conversation with a beaurocrat along the lines of "When do you want your tax disc, Sir?" and "Well, to get it done that fast is going to cost you" and so on and so forth.

So, my confession is, I do not have a tax disc and have therefore broken the law. Just as I was about to get into haggling down the price of my punishment, in stepped my work colleague to argue the (rather flimsy) case on my behalf. I didn't catch all he said but I heard the words "foreigner", "doesn't really understand", "works for a very big company" and "will never do it again."

Much to my suprise, it worked! We jumped back on our bikes and headed off for our photo shoot, leaving me feeling somewhat embarrassed but also pondering the thin and often blurry line between being on the wrong or right side of the law in Cambodia.